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Programming IT Technology

A House Divided: UWB's Double Standards 95

Posted by CmdrTaco from the battle-of-the-standards dept.
Mai writes "What happens when two coalitions within a standard come into conflict, and it doesn't get resolved quickly? The ultrawideband technology standard shows you."
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A House Divided: UWB's Double Standards More

A House Divided: UWB's Double Standards

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  • Answer to the question... (Score:5, Funny)

    by testing124 ( 772675 ) on Thursday January 27, 2005 @04:50PM (#11497070)
    DVD+/-RW happens.

  • A fight to the death? (Score:5, Funny)

    by eln ( 21727 ) on Thursday January 27, 2005 @04:50PM (#11497076)
    Is that the answer? Because let me tell you, a bunch of geeks in a hand-to-hand fight to the death would kick ass. Pay per view ratings would be through the roof!
    • For the entire month that it took for the first 2 emaciated gray(grey?)/green pair to finish each other off.

      and afer that it would be a Unionized sport (a la NHL)

      Better than The Apprentice bar far...

    • Only if you played the "Fight Music" from the original Star Trek while they were having it out.
    • What is geeky about that?

      All geek disputes should be solved by a mix of junkyard wars and D&D.

      In the junkyard wars both teams are given a pile of old computer parts and outdated software. Then both teams must assemble their own server with the resources they can scrounge up. The two servers then attempt to hack each other into exploding. (Well really just to shutting down, but the computers are rigged to blow when they do so without the player's knowledge)

      Afterwards the two teams meet for a game of D

  • We're Not Sure... (Score:5, Funny)

    by Tackhead ( 54550 ) on Thursday January 27, 2005 @04:51PM (#11497090)
    We don't have all the answers, but we know it involves executives from Intel and Motorola sticking their hands up the FTC and ITU commissioners' asses and some sort of sock-puppet Kabuki theatre.

  • Of course it's divided. (Score:4, Funny)

    by FireballX301 ( 766274 ) on Thursday January 27, 2005 @04:51PM (#11497094) Journal
    It was considered a military secret early on, because it has applications such as "spotting stealth planes" and "looking through walls."

    They can't decide which.

  • Why wait? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Spazmania ( 174582 ) on Thursday January 27, 2005 @04:52PM (#11497106) Homepage
    If we'd waited for standardization for 56k modems, we'd have waited an extra three years. Instead we had x2 and k56 flex for a little while. Was that a bad thing? No, not really. It took the pressure off the final v.90 standard, so they could take the time and get it right.

    • Re:Why wait? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by eln ( 21727 ) on Thursday January 27, 2005 @04:59PM (#11497213)
      Trust me, as someone who was working for an ISP that chose the k56 flex standard, it was a very very bad thing. Our tech support calls went through the roof, because k56 flex never really worked right. Those were the days when every ISP out there had these big books of modem init strings that they had to use on (it seemed) every other call. Let me tell you, trying 15 different init strings with people who only had one phone line in their house was no picnic. While the rush to 56k may have been good for the industry, it sure sucked for those of us working in the trenches at the time.

      • Re:Why wait? (Score:3, Informative)

        by outZider ( 165286 )
        I don't know, with good equipment, it wasn't so bad. We kept two numbers. One was for the V.90 bank, one was for the k56flex bank. While the main bank was more reliable for those in the boonies, and went to V.90 fairly well, the k56flex never really failed us, and generally had fantastic speed and reliability for those with semi-modern lines.
      • 'Let me tell you, trying 15 different init strings with people who only had one phone line in their house was no picnic.'

        You should have used e-mail! ;^)

      • I was also working for an ISP at the time, so I speak from experience. It Wasn't That Bad. Yes, it did have a higher support cost. Yes, that runs counter to the industry favored practice of increasing automation instead of staffing. So what? It beat the alternative which was no 56k for several more years, or worse: a rushed, poorly designed 56k standard.

    • Re:Why wait? (Score:1, Informative)

      by jesusfingchrist ( 853886 )
      Actually it was a terrible thing. It cost ISPs more money and forced them to decide which to support or to support both (even more money). Then after v90 came out the ISPs then again had to upgrade their modem banks (unless firmware upgrade was available) and end users once again are buying new modems since MOST EUs dont do firmware upgrades, etc. Then it left KFLEX users on X2 isps with 33.6 unless they get ANOTHER modem or ANOTHER isp. So "No, not really." isn't the case.
      • I remember being careful to buy a modem which promised a firmware upgrade plan to whichever standard was adopted.

        It was something from US Lobotics (before 3Com ate them up and 'passed' them through) and they kept their promise.
    • All was great then if you :

      1> played QW or Q2.

      2. had a provider that did X2.

      3. had a USR Sportster (f yeah I did(do))

      All others got 0wnz3rd at quake/2 (until too many hpbs forced us all to broadband)

    • Broken standards (Score:3, Insightful)

      by phorm ( 591458 )
      Because when a standard does come up, it might be broken. Standards often deal with legalities... so shipping a product that doesn't meet standards may in fact break some laws in various countries. I think this quote summarizes it well enough:

      What good does it do you to have a cell phone and a PDA that can exchange data, if they are required by law to be powered off the moment you leave the country? For that matter, this also increases manufacturing costs, and thus consumer costs, decreasing sales.

    • If we'd waited for standardization for 56k modems, we'd have waited an extra three years. Instead we had x2 and k56 flex for a little while. Was that a bad thing? No, not really. It took the pressure off the final v.90 standard, so they could take the time and get it right.

      The impact of that was mitigated by the fact that one end of the connection you had an ISP. Someone who could afford to support both standards. Things are a bit different on a consumer and smaller-organization basis. I can only ima

      • Actually, most ISPs did not support both standards because of the expense. They simply published a list of supported modems, and for that 3-year period you either picked a modem that your ISP supported or you picked an ISP that supported your modem. Or you used 33.6 and waited for the standard.

        It was a minor hassle, but the reward was 56k a couple years earlier, and pressure off the standards group so they didn't try to rush it.
    • The horrible part is that I'm *still* using v.90.
      I would kill to get DSL out here. Or even just ISDN.

      Please let me kill to get ISDN out here...
      • IIRC you can get isdn anywhere in the us because it's considered a 911 available service like regular pots. However just because the phone company must fill the order if you place doesn't mean they have to do so cheaply.
        I looked into it here, but they wanted several hundred to set it up and $80 a month to keep it. This for just basic isdn at the lowest standard rate.
        So you don't have to kill anyone, just rob a few of them, repeatedly.

        Mycroft
        • Actually, if they offer BRIs out of your central office, they likely fall under the universal service fund rules. That means they're not allowed to charge you more than anyone else to bring it to your door. Even if they have to spend thousands stringing new wires. That was the whole point of allowing the telcos to collect the USF fee on every phone bill: so that they could afford to deliver service to rural customers where it would otherwise be prohibitively expensive.

          You just have to figure out the right
          • Not having isdn capability at the local office is one of the reasons they cited when asking a small fortune to hook it up, though they did also cite the cost of running the lines to my house.
            Don't know if that changes anything, but I might check again.

            Mycroft
          • Out where I live, Sprint is the *only* phone company. It really sucks. A standard phone line with no long distance, no caller ID, no voicemail, no nothing--costs about $19/mo.

            If you want all the 'features', you have to pay around $26/mo.

            ISDN is actually available, but it's something like $45/mo through the telco, plus the local ISP charges $40/mo for only 200 channel hours.

            The alternative is moving to a town about 8 miles east of here. They have 256k down / 128k up DSL for the unholy price if $39/

  • Hideous flashback... (Score:5, Funny)

    by grub ( 11606 ) <slashdot@grub.net> on Thursday January 27, 2005 @04:53PM (#11497119) Homepage Journal

    "ultrawideband" made me think of my ex-wife's ass.

  • Standards? (Score:5, Funny)

    by TubaJon ( 786172 ) on Thursday January 27, 2005 @04:57PM (#11497179) Homepage
    Double standards...It's like when me and a friend turn in the exact same homework, and he gets an A+ while I get a B-.

  • Reality TV (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Have Blue ( 616 )
    When Standards Coalitions Attack, next on FOX!

  • Implications for SETI? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by SpamJunkie ( 557825 ) on Thursday January 27, 2005 @05:08PM (#11497304)
    From the article:

    a signal spread out so broadly that it just looks like background noise if you aren't the one it's aimed at.

    Would pose a problem for SETI if this is what all the other intelligent civilizations are doing.

    • Re:Implications for SETI? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by tetromino ( 807969 ) on Thursday January 27, 2005 @05:19PM (#11497444)
      a signal spread out so broadly that it just looks like background noise if you aren't the one it's aimed at.

      Would pose a problem for SETI if this is what all the other intelligent civilizations are doing.

      If SETI can detect any sign of an alien DVD player communicating with an alien TV set on Tau Ceti, I would guess that SETI is using a time machine to import radio telescopes from AD 2500 (in which case, they might as well be importing hyperspace drives).

      Seriosly though, high-power, unfocused, inefficient and uncompressed radio signals - the sort of thing SETI might be able to detect - are on the way out. Nowadays, signals travel over cables, or bounce from sattelites, and in any case use compression techniques that make the signal totally useless unless you know the protocol spec.

      Perhaps the best sign of a high-technology civilization that we can detect is a planet that suddenly emits a burst of gamma rays and then stops emitting any signals forever...
      • Would pose a problem for SETI if this is what all the other intelligent civilizations are doing.

        Are you trolling? SETI looks for intentional locator signals, not leaked noise, and everybody knows it whether they agree SETI is useful or not.
        • SETI looks for intentional locator signals, not leaked noise

          I know this is offtopic but...

          I've always wondered: if we find one of these intentional signals, are we going to answer? Kind of reminds me of that species of fish (no idea what it's called) that opens its mouth and sticks its tongue out, wriggling it about... nice little fishie, don't you want this cute little worm? CHOMP...

          / paranoia

          --"You can't surrender to them, any more than you can surrender to a tiger!", Gordon R. Dickson
          • I've always wondered: if we find one of these intentional signals, are we going to answer?

            If they're space-faring and homicidal we'd already be dead.

            I suspect we won't find any signals. In some neighborhoods you move in and the neighbors all bring you pies. But in other neighborhoods you have to go over and bring them a pie. Sitting on your porch desperately waiting for a pie does you no good at all.

            When we're ready (not paranoid) we'll say, "hello," and send out a pie. If we're lucky we'll get back
            • God, wouldn't it be great if the galaxy is really like this? I like your metaphor.

            • When we're ready (not paranoid) we'll say, "hello," and send out a pie. If we're lucky we'll get back a recipe for german chocolate cake.

              Been there, done that, got the t-shirt.

              Back in 1974 SETI sent out a message from the Arecibo radio observatory, towards a star cluster something like 25,000 light years away.

              It's what 30 years later, guess we'll have to way another 24,970 years for them to dig out that recipie to send us.
      • Perhaps the best sign of a high-technology civilization that we can detect is a planet that suddenly emits a burst of gamma rays and then stops emitting any signals forever...
        You mean like this [psu.edu]?
      • Seriosly though, high-power, unfocused, inefficient and uncompressed radio signals - the sort of thing SETI might be able to detect - are on the way out. Nowadays, signals travel over cables, or bounce from sattelites, and in any case use compression techniques that make the signal totally useless unless you know the protocol spec.

        You're right for the normal information-carrying signals we send out, but if you looked back at the Earth from a vast distance the most obvious and high-power signal you would d

  • wikipedia article on OFDM (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OFDM

    After reading this, it seems pretty clear that Motorola backs cdma-based solution just because it has already invested huge amounts in (w)cdma-based technologies, already having lots of patents giving it more royalties, not because of it's technological merits.
    • http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OFDM

      After reading this, it seems pretty clear that Motorola backs cdma-based solution just because it has already invested huge amounts in (w)cdma-based technologies, already having lots of patents giving it more royalties, not because of it's technological merits.

      The so-called Multiband OFDM Alliance appears to be rather counter to the whole point of OFDM. OFDM is extremely efficient with the frequency band it has to fit in, and doesn't need to be blasted over the whole s

    • Re:wikipedia article on OFDM (Score:1, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Motorola bought the company XtremeSpectrum which brought with them a complete DS-CDMA system. So any patents in UWB that Motorola has came with the purchase of XtremeSpectrum. As for other patents in CDMA perhaps you've heard of a company called Qualcomm that basically has them all.

      As to the merits of OFDM over CDMA, both techniques are fighting the same physically limitations, and so well engineered versions of either technique should have similar limitations. If you look at the maturity of the two propos

  • Two coalitions enter! One coalition leaves! (Score:5, Funny)

    by HarveyBirdman ( 627248 ) on Thursday January 27, 2005 @05:13PM (#11497369) Journal
    What happens when two coalitions within a standard come into conflict, and it doesn't get resolved quickly?

    Bloodshed? Radiological bombs? Thunderdome? Dogs and cat sleeping together? Befuddled Slashdot posts? Snow in California? More Star Wars prequels? The Battle Of Hastings? The Magna Carta? The Cotton Gin? I dunno, man! I wasn't expecting a quiz! You're harshing my buzz!

  • That's what you get. (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Dylan Thomas ( 853299 ) <dylan@freespirits.org> on Thursday January 27, 2005 @05:40PM (#11497683) Homepage Journal

    That's what you get when you put the standard before the technology. Step one: let companies use whatever standard is convenient for them, and sell their products to whomever they can convince to buy. Step two: once the market has tested the products, standardize based on best current practices.

    Sure, it has the net result of lots of poor guys owning a collection of relatively useless Betamax videos, but really, I'd rather own an obsolete product because it made its best shot and failed than own a mediocre product because it conformed to a political compromise that had no market time behind it. (And furthermore, it encourages the Betamax owners to switch to DVD more quickly than the content and universally supported VHS owners, thereby even further spurring development.)

    For real life examples, read some W3C Recommendations. The ones that were presented as ready-made standards before any market was actually implementing them (like PICS) are lovely pieces of technological poetry. The ones which were widely tested in the market and implemented first, even if in lots of non-compatible subversions, and only then standardized (like HTML), on the other hand, are actually used.

    • Ditto for stuff like those Belkin "pre-standard" 802.11n access-points. Non-techie users will buy them now, not understanding that they may/may not be upgradable to the standard and if they're not upgradable, Belkin has no responsibility to the customer for having sold a now useless product.

      So we wind up paying, sometimes over and over, so companies can fight it out in the marketplace. The marketplace is indeed an efficient means of sorting out winning from losing ideas and marketing schemes, but it oft

    • Sure, it has the net result of lots of poor guys owning a collection of relatively useless Betamax videos...
      Actually, most of us consider "laughing at the early adopters" to be one of the fringe bonuses of your plan.
  • From the article: "and how much of it has to do with optimistic investment in the path they thought the technology should take."

    Pretty much all of it. It is very much a standard strategy to bet on a play, build up your IC and more importantly, patent portfolio, and then come out swinging.

    You get a big jump on the competition.

    This strategy is now starting to backfire as companies do this and then realize that while they are stuck in the standards process they aren't making any money. That means there on

  • watch UWB very closely (Score:2, Interesting)

    by poincare ( 63294 )
    There's a book titled "In the Blink of an Eye," which details the Cambrian ecological explosion, which was precipitated, by (you guessed it), the emergence of vision among vertebrates. I expect a similar explosion for machines. In the modern era, we have rather well advanced robots, in terms of data sensing and actuators, but really crappy AI and control. The availability of decent remote control requires wireless video (who want's a robot attached to the wall?). UWB (or perhaps one of its successors)

  • More than meets the eye... (Score:1, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    As a former employee at a UWB startup, I can say that the whole process is screwed up. You have companies that recruit uncles and aunts of employees who aren't even remotely technical and fly them around to IEEE meetings so they can vote for the companies chosen standard. You also have companies like TI and Intel with huge 802.11 patent portfolios who are interested in pushing the MBOA spec so that UWB basically dies a horrible death. Or at least that was the perception at our company.

    In any case, this
    • Since the beginning of time all committes etc have been used as a way to abuse power.

      The FDA, who supposedly protects the US's food and health, will say a Mac and fries == two serves of vegetables (potatoes & tomatos used in the ketchup). EPA gets lobbied to hell by SUV vendors. Congress get fscked up by Christian campaigners.

      Why be suprised when Microsoft or Intel or whatever contorts USB, networking specs,... to their advantage.

  • I'm with Motorola on this one (Score:3, Insightful)

    by ka9dgx ( 72702 ) on Thursday January 27, 2005 @06:38PM (#11498369) Homepage Journal
    Based on the article alone, and on purely religious grounds, I'm with Motorola on this one. The whole point of UWB is to have a very wideband signal, so that you don't have to get into issues of having to avoid frequency X, Y, or Z.

    Once you start talking about frequencies, and channels, you might as well give up the game.

    --Mike--

  • The article asks "What good does it do you to have a cell phone and a PDA that can exchange data, if they are required by law to be powered off the moment you leave the country?"

    Seems to me that it might still be a little useful, in spite of that limitation...

  • No split, actually (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Joseph_Daniel_Zukige ( 807773 ) on Thursday January 27, 2005 @08:49PM (#11499521) Homepage Journal
    If you dig far enough back in the history of this, there were quite a few different approaches. About four years back, there were four main groups. iNTEL figured they had to lay their stake early, so they tried to muscle the other three out. eXtreme Spectrum had almost enough horsepower in their design to survive iNTEL's tactics, but finally had to turn to Motorola to bail them out.

    Why Motorola? Good question. Many of the core group at eXtreme Spectrum had just been laid off from Motorola, or had jumped before the layoffs.

    Why does iNTEL want this?

    This short-distance UWB is potentially going to replace all the wires on your information devices except for the power wires. If you were into patents, wouldn't you like a patent on wire? ("Patent on wire" was something of a buzz phrase during the infighting.)

    (Personally, I'm wondering if the XS/Freescale technique techniqe might be beneficial in power wires, but I don't know what I'm talking about.)

    If you ask me, though, iNTEL's idea of jumping from spectrum to spectrum seems to have the larger footprint, the higher susceptibility to eavesdripping and being dripped on, and the greater power requirements. It might scale to greater distance, but that might not be desirable for short-distance, high-bandwidth wireless.

    The XS/Freescale approach of basically spitting raw bits into the air at pseudo-random frequencies and very low power should be familiar with a crowd that understands crypto. You remember the story about the actress and the piano player and an early patent in the field.

    But, again, I don't know what I'm talking about, so my biases might be showing.

  • This is actually very common in standardisation (Score:3, Informative)

    by jodonoghue ( 143006 ) on Friday January 28, 2005 @01:31AM (#11500910) Homepage Journal

    Frankly, this is no surprise to those of us who have seen the standardisation process at work for a number of years. I work in mobile telecomms, so no surprise if I take my examples from there:

    • IMT2000 (which was supposed to choose one 'World' standard fro 3G phones) ended up choosing three (UMTS, CDMA2000 and FOMA) as the Europeans, Americans and Japanese couldn't agree)
    • UMTS has two completely different modes: TDD and FDD, because powerful interests in the GSM industry couldn't agree on which to choose.
    • The 3GPP standards are full of redundant mechanisms which are supposed to be mandatory, but are unnecessary.

    I could go on, but...

    Thing is, you have to look at what standardisation represents to the participants. It's an opportunity to gain licensing revenue from your patent portfolio, so you need to get as much of your IPR into the standard as possible.

    To do this, companies often make short-term alliances (i.e., I'll vote for this technology of yours if you vote for these technologies of mine) as a means to push the process in a preferred direction.

    In the case of UWB, there are two groups of companies each (probably) with significant IPR in one of the two technologies, so who stand to gain big bucks if their preferred solution is chosen. Each group is powerful enough to block the other, but not powerful enough to prevail. After a period of deadlock, this is the only real way out.

    You can't even make a purely technical argument for one or other technology. OFDMA is slightly more spectrally efficient than CDMA (with the emphasis on 'slightly'), but seems better suited to 'broadcast' style applications than to 'many bidirectional paths' of communication. The differences are small, but each side can claim that they are 'right'.

    As other psoters have suggested, the market will decide. The UMTS TDD mode I mentioned earlier is virtually unheard of in the marketplace: all of the major UMTS systems use WCDMA (although many of the ideas in TDD have surfaced in the Chinese TD-SCDMA standard - no surprise as Siemens was a major backer of UMTS TDD, and is now doing R&D in China for a system using similar technology).

    If you remember that standardisation is politics, with interoperability as both the price and outcome of the political process, then you won't be far wrong.

    • Thing is, you have to look at what standardisation represents to the participants. It's an opportunity to gain licensing revenue from your patent portfolio, so you need to get as much of your IPR into the standard as possible.

      It seems such a shame that their goal isn't to have interoperability (across brands) for the benefit of consumers (the majority), but rather to muscle the system to grab as much money as possible.

      At any rate, thanks very much for the reality check. (Not that it surprises me, min

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