Information Research Weblog

I've never been particularly interested in the various standards battles that have taken place over the years - if you wait long enough someone wins and you can then start buying the gear :-) However, on the wireless Ultra Wide-Band (UWB) front there are a couple of contenders currently slugging it out, the WiMedia Alliance and the UWB Forum. WiMedia Alliance is a combination of two other bodies - WiMedia and the Multiband OFDM Alliance SIG (MBOA-SIG) and has recently announced that Microsoft has become a 'promoter member', while the UWB Forum includes big players such as Motorola, Samsung and Siemens. The goal of both is to set the IEEE standard for UWB but my guess is that industry standards will proliferate here as they do in so many other technical areas.