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?"
3.1GHZ Has trouble going through walls (Score:5, Insightful)
Windows Admin Tools [intelliadmin.com]
Yea yea yea... (Score:5, Insightful)
Yea, yea, yea... That sounds so desperately trying to hype it up. Just a month ago we were discussing that current digital A/V *cables* can't handle high enough resolutions for some larger (resolution) monitors out there, which requires two or even four DVI cables.
We've discussed also how the new standard introduced, is just as bad (despite claims to "scale indefinitely", in theory, with other equipment and all that..).
Now this is of course gonna replace everything, including food and water in one year. Therefore buy our shares and give us venture capital. Screw it.
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?
I don't get it: we have enough problems with people logging into our wifi networks because it passes through walls already (even if it's password protected and so on, it can be hacked into), and now they found a way to do the same with UWB? I kinda like it in my room only, neighbours will have to buy theirs.
Re:What about bluetooth? (Score:4, Insightful)
You may ask why we can't have one all encompassing protocol - the answer, cost. Bluetooth is the cheapest, GPRS and WiFi cost more. So for a BT headset the cost would rocket up if it had to do be fully compliant with a new protocol.
Anyway, in the grand scheme it's all a bit pointless. There's more interesting things in life, like mountains, women and fast cars. Who cares about wireless!
Re:Getting Crowded (Score:3, Insightful)
All I know is that this would have been great to have when I was retrofitting my home for cable last year. That was a pain...
n is still better (Score:4, Insightful)
No Data (Score:4, Insightful)
Since the high frequency makes it *very* less able to go around objects, how did they do it indeed?
Were they able to use EIT ?
BTW, they did not speak about the degradation pattens in the article.
Any ideas on the same?
Fix the drawback (Score:2, Insightful)
I hope this UWB - being a successor of USB - has connectors that work "upside-down". Oh wait...
UWB could be quite simple to implement but ... (Score:1, Insightful)
Any kind of wireless communication pushes up the general noise level. If the communication is restricted to a certain bandwidth, the noise affects other users of the same bandwidth. On the other hand, uwb will affect people in bands that are supposed to be clear. We have the specter of satellite links degrading because ten million people are using uwb for their cordless phones. My wag is that the FCC will eventually have to put its foot down if uwb becomes too successful.
Re:Fix the drawback (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Fix the drawback (Score:2, Insightful)
UWB not so scalable... (Score:3, Insightful)
Ye Gods, I hope not. UWB is absolutely terrific so long as a limited number of people use it -- but it's one of those solutions that sound great until you multiply by 10,000,000 installed devices -- then everyone's radio noise floor goes up, stealing bandwidth (range, really) from things like FM music, shortwave, air traffic control, and emergency services. By that time it's too late, because you can't track down and eliminate 10^7 devices -- short of nuking the city centers.
Re:3.1GHZ Has trouble going through walls (Score:2, Insightful)
If the trees were dense and the power ouput the same then 2.4GHz would win out.