Is Ultrawideband still a viable wireless technology?
The second problem, however, is more serious: Initial testing of UWB products is showing pathologically low throughput. I spoke with two engineers, both of whom have significant design and testing experience, who are evaluating UWB products. They mentioned that throughput of less than 20Mbit/sec. at a range of a meter or so is common, although up to 60Mbit/sec. has been measured. The exception to this is in reference-design products from Pulse-Link, which does not follow the certified Wireless USB spec. Here, throughput of over 500Mbit/sec. has been observed — megabit Ethernet speeds on wireless. So, why the limited performance of wireless USB? I debated this with the engineers doing the testing, and we discussed three possibilities. First, there could be a fundamental flaw in UWB or WUSB. This seems unlikely, since a lot of companies invested a lot of money in the technology and likely would not have done so without effective due diligence. Second, there could be flaws in today’s har
