Category: Home networks

It looks like the good guys are going get together and win after all:

MANHASSET, N.Y. — Intel has convinced fellow chip makers Broadcom, Atheros and Marvell to join forces outside of an IEEE wireless LAN group to develop an interoperable physical and media access control (MAC) layer scheduled to be presented for IEEE acceptance by November.

By working independently of the IEEE’s 802.11n next-generation task group, Intel has angered task group members who accuse the Intel-led alliance of everything from co-opting the IEEE process to outright antitrust violations that could draw Federal Trade Commission (FTC) scrutiny.

Suspicions have been amplified by the PC-centric nature of the alliance as well as the secretive approach the group has taken, including the signing of nondisclosure agreements. The omission of Airgo Networks Inc. (Palo Alto, Calif.) from the alliance has also fueled accusations that the alliance is trying to offset Airgo’s competitive advantage.

The main issue here is avoiding years of litigation around Airgo’s massive collection of junk patents.

Software-based TiVo replacements are coming out of the woodwork. Freevo is open-source, and there’s SageTV, MythTV, SnapStream, and Media Center. TiVo is screwed.

Here’s a nice piece about UWB. There are different visions of UWB right now, ranging from cable replacement to a full-scale IP network, so we don’t know how it’s going to play out. But recent agreements between WiMedia and Wireless USB and Bluetooth indicate it’s not going to be another powerline network.

UPDATE: I ran into a WiMedia officer to day who said he hadn’t seen this story, so I naturally enouraged him to check it out. It is Markoff, after all.

This is very good news:

The IEEE working group dedicated to the next-generation 802.11n standard has settled on a single proposal, TGn Sync, members said late Thursday night.

The proposal, which is backed by Atheros, Intel, Sony, Matsushita, Toshiba, and others, must now garner a 75 percent “supermajority” vote at the next IEEE meeting in May. The TGn Sync won in a head-to-head vote against the WWiSE proposal, led by a collection of communications companies including Airgo Networks, Broadcom, Conexant, Motorola, Nokia, and Texas Instruments.

The vote makes the TGn Sync proposal all but certain to win the IEEE’s approval as the next IEEE 802.11n standard sometime in 2006 or 2007. If approved by the supermajority vote, the proposal would then move forward as the draft standard and then as the final specification.

The 75% hurdle can sometimes be a tough one, as it’s been for UWB, but there’s no doubt that the better proposal won this round.

Thanks to the good guys, my work here is done.

H/T Dana Blankenhorn.

Today’s FCC ruling is a green-light for WiMedia/MBOA/Intel/TI, but to hear Freescale you’d think it was exactly what they wanted.

Let’s be clear, it wasn’t. Freescale hoped the ruling would bar the WiMedia system from the marketplace, and it didn’t. This is pretty much the death-knell for Freescale’s UWB product line unless they can find a new niche, and there are no two ways about it.

UPDATE: Here’s the WiMedia press release:
Continue reading “FCC ruling favors WiMedia”

According to Freescale guy Matt Wellborn, UWB is faster, cheaper, and less power-hungry than 802.11n:

Current proposals for scaling 802.11 systems to higher rates (500 Mbits/s or more) in 802.11n are based on the continued use of 64-QAM. Scaling to higher rates will be enabled through the use of multiple-input-multiple-output (MIMO) techniques that use multiple antennas to send multiple data streams in parallel through the wireless channel. For this approach, the processing complexity also increases with data rate (FEC decode, FFT/iFFT, equalization, etc). There will also be increased complexity and power consumption due to the requirement for up to 4 transmit/receive processing chains (multiple ADC/DAC pairs, filters, amplifiers, etc).

As digital process technology scales, the digital portions of each system will scale much faster to lower cost and power. The significant analog potions of the system will scale more slowly and will thus have a proportionally bigger impact when these functions represent a larger portion of the implementation. The power consumption and area required for large ADCs and linear PAs becomes a bigger factor as digital technology scales in the future.

As we evaluate the two technologies for very high rate, low power applications, we see that the impact of system bandwidth is significant in many areas. As the narrowband designs are extended to higher rates, the use of high order modulation and multiple-antenna technologies can provide scalable and robust performance, but will also likely lead to increased complexity and power consumption. Systems that use wider bandwidths, such as DS-UWB, can use fundamentally different design approaches to provide wireless connectivity solutions that scale to even higher data rates with more scalable and lower complexity implementations.

Is he right?

More on UWB and the FCC at Techworld.com:

UWB is a challenge to regulators like the FCC and the UK’s Ofcom, which are accustomed to licensing most frequencies exclusively, because it spreads radio signals across a broad range of spectrum at low powers that are not expected to interfere with other radio equipment (see our explanation). The FCC has approved it, so long as it emits less radiation than devices such as PCs or CD players are already allowed to leak.

Of course the kicker on that radiation question is how you measure it, since the radiation emitted by a UWB system has a different spatial and temporal pattern than that emitted by a PC.

One of the takeaways from this story is that the 802 standards process is broken. It takes 75% to advance a proposal to the standards-writing phase and virtual unanimity to complete the standard. UWB has been in limbo for three years because neither side could get 75%, and 802.11e has been done for 18 months but not officially completed.

Too many people have too many agendas these days, and it’s too easy to derail the process.

I expect the breaking news of the FCC’s ruling should be on the WiMedia web site before the weekend.

Here are some handy links on the Wi-Media/MBOA merger we mentioned yesterday:

MBOA, WiMedia tie UWB knot (by Patrick Mannion)

EE Times

Comms Design

Alliance Simplifies Ultrawideband Debate (by Mark Hachman)

eWeek

Extreme Tech

“Ultrawideband Groups Merge” (by Eric Griffith)

Internet News.com

Wi-Fi Planet

DevX News

Ultrawideband partners merge (by Rupert Goodwins)

ZDNet UK

ZDNet UK via Yahoo UK & Ireland News

“Ultra-Wideband Trade Groups Merge”

TelecomWeb

“WiMedia Alliance and MBOA-SIG Merge”

Yahoo Finance

Wireless IQ

Wireless Design Online

RF Globalnet

“Alereon Voices Support for WiMedia and MBOA Merger” (Alereon)

Yahoo Finance

Internet Telephony Magazine

Wireless IQ

Ultra-Wideband Wireless Products Move a Step Closer to Market Availability with Completion of Key Specifications (Intel)

Yahoo Finance

IT Pronto

Ultra-Wideband Wireless Closer (Intel) by Chris Roper

ign.com

“Intel Drives UWB Spec” (Intel)

Unstrung.com

Glenn Fleishmann’s Wi-Fi Networking News scoops the MSM on the merger of the two leading UWB organizations:

The two leading industry groups for ultrawideband merge: The Multi-Band OFDM Alliance and the WiMedia Alliance are merging their two groups to align goals more fully and reduce the number of acronyms and institutions. The two groups have very similar general technology goals for UWB, and this leaves Motorola and Freescale even more in the lurch as the personal area networking (PAN) focus of WiMedia and the consumer electronics focus of MBOA come together.

While WiMedia and MBOA have been working together for a while, the formal merger leaves no doubt as to what the dominant UWB standard will be: Motorola/Freescale is out in the cold. While there are still some issues with the FCC’s stance on MBOA – no statement has been issued from the government so far – there’s little doubt that the MBOA’s approach is both technically superior and more widely supported, so the big buildout can commence without IEEE 802.15.3a endorsement.

And it has, if the demo of Wireless USB at the Intel conference is any guide.