14 DAY TRIAL // The letters UWB stand for Ultrawideband, which is in fact a developing standard that allows for large bandwidth to be used in order to send data over short distance wirelessly. According to several reports, the UWB standard will be legalized in Europe by mid 2007 making this a unique occasion for the new technology to show its muscles.
The standard concerns extremely high-speed, short range wireless communications, allowing for a data troughput of up to 1Gbps. Although UWB is fast and can translate into a number of new uses regarding wireless transmissions, the technology is still only available for use in the U.S. and Japan under very strict conditions.
After studying the technology and the specifications, the European Commission and the Radio Spectrum Committee (RSC) have said that they plan to introduce it in as many countries as they can and push it across Europe in order to force the development of UWB products.
"We think it's important to allow as many technologies to be tried in the marketplace as possible. [UWB] has some potentially unique characteristics," said chief technologist of Ofcom, William Webb. Webb also noted that when UWB becomes more widely available in Europe, it will have even greater restrictions imposed on it than those in the U.S. mainly because it uses short range but yet powerful transmitters that can interfere with other wireless devices.
UWB is the result of cooperative research and study between several microcontroller and network companies such as Freescale, Intel, HP, Nokia, Texas Instruments and several others. Freescale was one of the original members of the UWB forum and development group but later they decided that the direction of UWB will be no longer followed because it does not represent the interests of the company.
Although it's not a completely developed standard, UWB products have already begun to emerge in various parts of the world where the standard has already been declared legal. In Japan, Y-E Data has released a wireless USB hub that uses UWB technology in order to transmit the information. More products based on the UWB standard are programmed to appear in the beginning of 2007.