Wi-Fi vs. UWB: A Coming Battle

Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and other short-range wireless technologies may face a major competitor in the unlikeliest of places: ultra wide band (UWB), aka wireless USB, which will come to market as early as the end of the year. In turn, wireless service providers looking to gain an edge with advanced mobile devices need to plan their device road maps carefully, and triple-play providers should reconsider the home gateway.

According to In-Stat, most digital interconnects — the connections between devices and peripherals — first are adopted in PCs and then in other consumer electronics. Despite the growth of Wi-Fi in both segments, UWB sales will overtake Wi-Fi volume in the near future, the firm predicts. Qasim Inam, an analyst at In-Stat, says that while Wi-Fi and UWB would seem to fulfill different functions, they actually will go head to head in a range of scenarios.

UWB began as a wireless replacement for wired USB ports, a way to clean up the tangle of wires connecting printers, keyboards, iPods and more. But as the standard gets built into various devices, it also can be leveraged for downloading pictures from a digital camera or phone to a PC, for mobile banking applications, or for connecting the television, refrigerator, PC, mobile device and anything else together in a connected home environment — without the need for configuration. It’s also compatible with any other wireless standard, and there’s the possibility of creating a “repeater” system to boost its range. “The only thing Wi-Fi beats UWB on is range,” notes Inam. “UWB offers 480mbps throughput and is a point-to-point, inherently secure connection. There’s no need for a router, either, as it handles simultaneous connections in a point-to-point way. Consider that on Wi-Fi if you have five or 10 users on one router, the performance is seriously diminished.”

All of this makes UWB applicable to — and disruptive of — the current device/gateway strategies in place today by vendors and service providers. “This is absolutely a disruptive standard,” says Inam. “Once you put this over any legacy interconnect, be it wired or wireless, that connection becomes 480mbps. So essentially, UWB eliminates the advantages other standards have, and the industry will question why we even need the other protocols. The device landscape will change.”

UWB is expected to become adopted into the Bluetooth standard, perhaps even replacing the Bluetooth we know today. That has silicon manufacturers on their toes. For instance, chipmaker Broadcom Corp. recently announced a reference design combining Wi-Fi and Bluetooth onto a standard module for OEMs — an industry first. Devices containing the chipset can stream music to a Bluetooth headset or speakers, while downloading more music from a Wi-Fi hotspot, for example. But now, Broadcom is looking closely at UWB, “especially because UWB is scheduled to become part of the Bluetooth specification in the relatively near future,” a spokesperson says. “But as the technology matures and achieves greater integration with Bluetooth, we expect to have a strong solution available to complement our market-leading Bluetooth products.”

And what of Wi-Fi, which offers a much larger range than UWB’s few feet and would seem to have a strong competitive advantage. “This will most certainly challenge Wi-Fi,” says Inam. “As more data is passed around in the home, the more opportunity for Wi-Fi’s point-to-multipoint architecture to become a bottleneck.” He says he expects the two eventually to coexist, once the coming turf wars shake out. Wi-Fi will be used for coffee shop access, say, while consumers will leverage wireless USB to connect to a home gateway.

The future of UWB does rest on the outcome of those turf wars because of its identity crisis as a standard. For instance, Intel Corp. is leveraging the technology to provide the ability to create ad hoc personal area networks. Meanwhile, the WiMedia Alliance (of which Intel is a member) is in charge of developing the standard, but there is, as yet, no IEEE support. It may become wrapped into Bluetooth, as mentioned earlier. To date, there is no interoperability push between vendors.

Regardless, the Wi-Fi/UWB fight is coming, Inam says, and service providers would do well to stay on top of the situation.

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