Bluetooth embraces WiMedia for UWB

The Bluetooth Special Interest Group today selected the ultra wideband (UWB) technology backed by the WiMedia Alliance as the basis for the next generation of the Bluetooth standard. The move is a huge win for the Intel-backed WiMedia, which has been fighting fiercely with the UWB Alliance for primacy in the emerging short-range wireless space.

Once believed to be a major challenger to Bluetooth, UWB was embraced by the Bluetooth SIG in May, promising to put its powerful name recognition and 500-million-strong market penetration behind any eventual standard. The SIG publicly took no sides in the debate at the time, but in December the UWB Alliance and WiMedia killed any hope for a standard, saying they’d let both the market and the Bluetooth community to make the decision between the two groups respective technologies, Direct Sequence UWB (DS-UWB) and MultiBand Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (MB-OFDM). The risk appears to have paid off for WiMedia. With the backing of the SIG it is now being standardized under the aegis of another industry body and has a clear path to commercialization.

The future of the UWB Alliance and DS-UWB, however, is definitely in question. Though there is no overarching UWB industry standard to buck, the Freescale, Motorola and other DS-UWB backers would have to compete directly against Bluetooth and its established community of vendors. In addition, the Alliance may be seeing defectors. Today in a statement from WiMedia Alliance, Samsung was listed as a member of the organization, though it was previously a supporter of the UWB Alliance.

For Bluetooth, the UWB could propel Bluetooth into a much broader market of devices. While the Bluetooth has built up an impressive penetration in the last two years, it doesn’t have the bandwidth to support higher capacity applications like streaming video. The switch to UWB technologies could put some strain on Bluetooth’s current vendors though, according to ABI Research analyst Stuart Carlaw.

”From the manufacturers’ perspective, this announcement means that Bluetooth vendors will have to develop or purchase robust and viable WiMedia solutions to remain competitive,” Carlaw said. “It poses added design demands for manufacturers and requires a totally different skill set, compared to the comparatively simple Bluetooth design process.”