Special report: Wireless networking: ultrawideband: Multimedia unplugged

  • Authors:
  • Steve Stroh

  • Affiliations:
  • -

  • Venue:
  • IEEE Spectrum
  • Year:
  • 2003

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Abstract

Promising to eliminate just about all of a home's signal cables, ultrawideband very-low-power wireless technology, when finally standardized, will be a carrier-based system most likely incorporating frequency hopping and orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM). Its purpose: to replace almost every data cable in the home, even the ones going in and out of the television set, a job that requires moving hundreds of megabits of data per second. That' s faster than all but the speediest of wired networks. The speed is achieved, however, over distances of only 10 meters or so. Ultrawideband (UWB) handles anything from high-speed streams carrying real-time HDTV programs to images downloaded from a digital camera to low-speed timing signals for keeping clocks accurate.