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Ultra Wideband, or UWB, the future wireless standard that could see half-a-Gigabit wireless links replacing USB and Bluetooth, could at last break out of its standards purgatory.

A new proposal by PulseLink suggests any number of UWB standards could operate, if devices use an agreed low-speed signaling mode to negotiate. To sidestep the standards snarl-up at the IEEE, the idea will be put to the world's telecoms body, the ITU, in June.

Ultra Wideband radio sends data in pulses across a wide frequency band. Legal in the U.S.--as long as it uses less power than normal RF leakage--it still has problems finding a wider market. The chip-makers are still only at sample stage of silicon, but the bigger problem is that there is no standard. The popular MBOA Alliance, proposed by Intel and friends, is always blocked at the IEEE standards body by a smaller group backed by Motorola, based around direct sequencing. Motorola has so far managed to muster a big enough minority, leaving the IEEE standards process stuck.

"A common signaling mode could iron out regulatory differences as well as standards," says Bruce Watkins, chief operating officer of PulseLink, at the Wireless LAN event in London this week. All vendors have to do is agree on a simple low-speed communications link, and then devices can use this to make contact and negotiate to speak in any higher-speed UWB standard they both understand.

Coming Soon?

The world's senior telecoms standard body, the International Telecommunications Union, has a meeting June 9 to June 18, to look at UWB proposals. Unfortunately, it has so far been reported to be hostile to any form of UWB.

Despite this, Watkins is optimistic, suggesting that the common signaling mode could be used to negotiate UWB signaling that met any regional regulatory requirements. "A common signaling mode might be a regulatory requirement so that different countries could enforce their own UWB standards," he says.

"From a cost standpoint, the implication is about ten cents," he says. "There is no financial or technological reason not to do this," he says, and plenty of good reasons to go ahead. The scheme would not only allow different vendors to run different standards, but a single vendor could to bring out new versions without compatibility problems. It could even allow multiple UWB standards to operate at the same time. "It would intelligently allocate time slots to different UWB devices," says Watkins.

Watkins repeated his company's promise to deliver a "software-defined radio" sometime this summer, which can adapt to whatever UWB technology is required of it, if necessary with a small download of software.

Software-defined cognitive radio is the way to go, he says, pointing to interest at the FCC on the subject. There have also been papers from Intel and others promoting the idea.