Fixed Wireless Business

Comparable Cost and Consternation UWB: Great Promise, But No Guarantees—continued

UWB could deliver significant benefits. It delivers bandwidth and reliability comparable with licensed broadband wireless systems—but without the considerable cost of licenses.

It eliminates multipath problems that plague spread spectrum systems. It is relatively easy to engineer non-line-of-sight (NLOS), user-installable systems using UWB. And because it uses very low-powered radios and simple designs, the cost per user for customer premises equipment (CPE) promises to be much lower than spread spectrum systems that provide comparable reliability and speeds.

Sprint, for example, is looking for next-generation MMDS CPE in the $200-to-$300 range. Mulloy believes that even without reducing UWB radios to application specific integrated circuit (ASIC) chips the technology could deliver systems at half that cost. And with chip technology, it could be reduced to $10 to $15.

There is one other advantage for manufacturers. Much less of the design of a UWB system is dependent on the spectrum it will use than is the case with spread spectrum. So it would be relatively simple and inexpensive to adapt basic designs to work in different spectrum ranges allocated in different jurisdictions.

How long will it take for all this to come to pass?

"I wish I could guess," Mulloy says. "But there are just too many parameters, and a lot of it would be politics. Optimistically, it's two to three years out."

Furthermore, despite the apparently clear cut advantages, UWB may have a tough time competing against more established spread spectrum technologies like Bluetooth, which are backed by high-profile players such as Ericsson.

To succeed, Mulloy says, UWB will have to "find those niche areas where spread spectrum doesn't work as well, where multipath is an issue or where you can do UWB on an unlicensed basis with higher data rates [than unlicensed spread spectrum systems.]"

Is UWB too good to be true? Maybe. Or maybe it's just too good to be soon.

—End

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