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The next big thing is actually ultrawide – But technology hampered by regulatory hurdles, a clash over standards

The space shuttle videos looked almost better than the real thing. They were high-definition videos, on display earlier this month at the Sheraton Boston Hotel. And though there’s nothing unusual these days about high-definition television, these two videos came from an unusual source — a laptop computer in one corner of a medium-sized conference room.

By Hiawatha Bray, Globe Staff

http://www.boston.com/business/technology/articles/2004/06/25/the_next_big_thing_is_actually_ultrawide/

The laptop was plugged into a black box bearing two small antennas; similar boxes were plugged into the HDTV monitors. The result was a wireless network powerful enough to broadcast two different high-definition videos simultaneously, with enough leftover capacity to handle a third channel.

Those black boxes were built by Freescale Semiconductor, a division of Motorola Corp. The microchips inside them can pump out 110 million bits of data per second — twice as much as the fastest WiFi wireless networking equipment now on the market. And that’s just the beginning. Before the year’s out, Freescale will be making chips that run twice as fast; by next year, it plans to offer a slice of silicon that will broadcast wireless data at one billion bits per second.

Freescale is one of the leaders in a new kind of digital technology called "ultrawideband" that’s being described as the next big consumer wireless technology, thanks to its ability to pump out massive amounts of data. But even though some ultrawideband devices will come to market this year, the technology is still hobbled by regulatory challenges and a long-running clash between two incompatible ultrawideband systems. According to Bob Heile, the Attleboro physicist who leads a wireless standards-setting committee for the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), "Right now, it’s 10 percent technology and 90 percent politics."

Most radio devices send out a signal over a narrow band of frequencies. For example, WiFi data networks use a small set of frequencies in the 2.4 gigahertz range. But ultrawideband works by broadcasting over a much larger chunk of the radio spectrum — from 3.1 to 10.5 gigahertz — all at the same time. As a result, even a low-powered ultrawideband radio signal can carry huge amounts of data.

Ultrawideband technology has other powerful attributes. Because the signal can penetrate solid objects, police forces and armies use the technology in radar systems that can see through walls. The precise digital pulses of an ultrawideband radio make it possible to locate a transmitter with an accuracy of a few inches, so automakers are working on ultrawideband detectors that can spot oncoming cars and prevent collisions.

But consumers will probably get their first taste of ultrawideband in home electronics gear that will no longer have to be connected by wires. "Imagine that you could bring a home theater setup home, plunk the components down, plug in the power cords, and essentially they’d all be connected," said Charles Golvin, an ultrawideband analyst for Forrester Research in San Francisco. "That’s a pretty powerful vision."

These low-powered ultrawideband systems will be able to transmit only over short distances — no more than 30 feet for high-definition TV — but as far as 100 feet for less demanding applications like music. That’s far enough for many household applications. Instead of running wires from the DVD player to the TV set, people will be able to plug in an ultrawideband system that will wirelessly transmit the picture. Or a computer full of tunes downloaded from the Internet could use an ultrawideband link to play them over the living room stereo system.

Replacing home-electronics cables with radio waves is an old idea. Bluetooth, a short-range system mostly found in wireless cellphone headsets, was invented as a wire replacement. And consumer electronics firms have begun selling devices that use WiFi wireless networking to link computers and home entertainment machines. But neither Bluetooth nor WiFi can match ultrawideband’s massive data carrying capacity.

That’s why Freescale is rushing its ultrawideband technology to market. According to documents provided by the company, Freescale will begin selling its first ultrawideband chips to consumer electronics firms this autumn, in time for the companies to have finished products ready for the Christmas shopping season. Freescale hasn’t released the names of electronics firms that will use the technology. But Micro-Star International of Taiwan, one of the top makers of personal computer motherboards, says it will begin building ultrawideband into some of its products, and will sell an ultrawideband card to let consumers upgrade their home machines.

(Motorola and Freescale officials refused to be interviewed for this story. Motorola on Monday filed to spin off Freescale later this year in an initial public offering that could fetch up to $2.7 billion. A spokeswoman for the company said that until the stock sale is complete, federal securities regulations forbid executives from giving interviews.)

But don’t expect to see a global market in ultrawideband devices; at present, the technology is legal only in the United States. Regulators in the rest of the world are worried about interference from a radio technology that broadcasts on the same frequencies used by many other devices, from cellphones to military radios.

"It’s going to be at least a year if not longer" before other major nations approve some kind of ultrawideband system, according to the IEEE’s Heile. But ultrawideband engineers say their devices broadcast at such low power that there’s very little threat of interference. Regulators at the Federal Communications Commission agreed in 2002, clearing the way for Americans to use ultrawideband products. But the lack of a ready market in other parts of the world will discourage mass production of the devices.

Besides, Freescale isn’t the only maker of ultrawideband gear. A rival band of chipmakers, including Intel Corp. and Texas Instruments Inc., are working on a different, incompatible approach to consumer ultrawideband. The IEEE, which is supposed to set global standards for such devices, is hopelessly deadlocked between the two systems. That means that the two camps are going ahead with their own versions. In the end, consumers will have to sort it out.

It might not come to that if Pulse-Link Inc. has its way. Pulse-Link of Carlsbad, Calif., makes ultrawideband chips that it says are compatible with the other two ultrawideband systems. Company president Bruce Watkins hopes his products can serve as a bridge between the two rival camps.

But Watkins has an even more ambitious plan for his ultrawideband chips. Wireless ultrawideband has to use low power levels to avoid interference with other radio signals. But there’s no law that says ultrawideband has to be wireless. By using the same principle on a wire, it’s possible to dramatically increase the amount of data it can carry. The system doesn’t work very well with phone wires, because they lack the proper shielding; too much of the ultrawideband signal leaks out. But it does quite nicely on the electric power lines inside a house, Watkins claimed, and even better on coaxial television cable.

So Pulse-Link has designed ultrawideband chips that will talk to each other through a home’s electrical wiring, or through the cable television system. "We coexist with what the network is already carrying," said Watkins. "We don’t require any changes at all to the network."

Simply by putting a Pulse-Link device at the cable company office and in the customer’s set-top box, Watkins said his company will be able to add one billion bits of new downstream data capacity to the cable, and 480 million bits of new upstream capacity. The same set-top box will be able to relay data through its power cord to every other Pulse-Link-equipped device in the house.

The result could be dozens of new high-definition TV channels and Internet services that put today’s cable systems to shame, delivered at very low cost. South Korea, Japan, and other countries are spending billions to run superfast fiber-optic cables to homes; US companies may well follow suit. SBC Communications yesterday said it would spend $4 billion to $6 billion over the next five years to build a new fiber backbone for advanced data services.

Watkins claims that running fiber to the home will cost up to $3,700 per subscriber. He says a cable company can install his system for just $100 per customer, and deliver the same kind of enhanced service, without having to lay a single foot of new cable.

"I expect that we’ll probably be ready to do that by the tail end of 2005," he said. By then the squabbles over wireless ultrawideband may have been sorted out as well, and the ultrawideband market will finally be ready for liftoff.

Hiawatha Bray can be reached at [email protected].
© Copyright 2004 Globe Newspaper Company.

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