Ultrawideband: Dead on arrival

You can be forgiven if you don't know what Ultrawideband, commonly referred to via the acronym UWB, actually is. The tech industry has been touting this dog for years at trade shows, trotting out demo after demo and even the occasional product here and there -- but little has been done to educate the consumer about what it actually is.

No matter any more: According to In-Stat, it's virtually dead already and will be completely gone from the market by 2013.

UWB had the misfortune of attempting to solve a problem that didn't exist. The idea was to offer a high-speed networking solution over a short range, which sounds good in theory... but it turns out that just wasn't that useful. Despite UWB's inflated specs, Wi-Fi has both better real-world performance and longer range (and huge market acceptance), and Bluetooth has long since filled any lingering networking needs in the short-range, lower-bandwidth department. And with both Wi-Fi and Bluetooth getting more reliable and faster over time, UWB has been effectively shut out of the market from both sides.

It didn't help that early UWB products were expensive, buggy, quite large in size, and surprisingly slow, making it a real challenge to convince anyone to buy the stuff. And with margins being squeezed by both competition and recession, UWB's last great hope -- getting UWB preinstalled on laptop computers, a la Wi-Fi and Bluetooth radios, which would give it an instant installed base that could be touted in press releases -- has largely dried up as well.

A solid half-dozen startups that have pinned their hopes on UWB have already folded or been sold off for scrap, and UWB will even lose its trade association, the WiMedia Alliance, when it abandons ship at the end of 2009. Just three UWB startups remain in existence today.

What does the future of local-area wireless look like? Wireless HD technologies designed for media streaming are crawling forward at a snail's pace, and nothing much else is really visible on the horizon. Looks like you're probably soaking in that future already: Wi-Fi, Wi-Fi, and more Wi-Fi.