Ultrawideband Signal Passes Data Through Walls 139
writertype writes "You may already be familiar with ultrawideband; UWB technology has been specifically talked about and designed to replace wired USB connections for over a year. Due to its high bandwidth, it's also been considered as an A/V cable replacement. The problem is that UWB radio performance degrades precipitously, effectively confining it to a single room. Until now, that is. Startup TZero says its UWB implementation provides high throughput through walls. Will this be an effective competitor to 802.11n?"
Quick response... (Score:5, Informative)
Um, no. 802.11n has significantly greater range (as a spec, at least). Plus, if this company is claiming to have developed it, I don't think they will just give it up for free. 802.11n is a public standard.
So, no. ;-)
Of course not. (Score:3, Informative)
Different markets (Score:3, Informative)
WPAN (Personal Area Networks), like Bluetooth or ZigBee, aim at a different market than WLAN (WiFi). For a WPAN, it may be advantageous to have a shorter range to reduce interference.
Extending the range to blur the line between WPAN and WLAN is an interesting business plan. There are numberous competing technolgies in the WPAN arena, and history tells that not all will survive. Time will tell if this one is viable.
Re:3.1GHZ Has trouble going through walls (Score:5, Informative)
The 'going through walls' part is a bit of a tempest in a teapot. That will come when the RF aspects of UWB are better designed.
Re:Quick response... (Score:3, Informative)
UWB is not designed for long range, it is meant for very low power rich message passing
Neither are proprietary
I agree that 802.11n and UWB will not dethrone one another, because they are not really equivalent or competeting.
Re:3.1GHZ Has trouble going through walls (Score:4, Informative)
It is line-of-sight w.r.t. buildings, but there was a group of trees inbetween. The signal had to pass trough maybe 20 meters of foilage.
The link barely worked. Sometimes 6 Mbps, sometimes 12 Mbps.
Relocating one of the endpoints so that those trees were out of the way (actual position lower than it was, now just skimming a building) improved the signal by about 20dB.
Result: 54Mbps link and power output decreased by 5-6dB (by TPC). Could probably gain another 6dB by having more clearance above the building.
I really did not expect this, comparing with results on 2.4 GHz.
You are right that allowed ERP on 2.4 is lower, but I think there would have been a big difference in path loss in this case.
MIMO Myth (Score:3, Informative)
If you actually crunch through the math, increasing the number of antennas basically increases the theoretical capacity of the wireless channel, meaning faster transmission speeds over the same distance/attenuation/power. So the extra antennas aren't in case one antenna fails, it's to increase transmission speeds.
Re:3.1GHZ Has trouble going through walls (Score:3, Informative)