Great Red Herring story on the attempts of incumbent wireless companies to squelch disruptive ultra-wideband radio technology at the FCC:
All of which makes one wonder: why are the wireless carriers so afraid of UWB, especially as the FAA and DOD have been using it without incident for 40 years? Perhaps because they know how effective UWB is. "This is about competitive concerns," says Maura Colleton, managing director of Qorvis Communications, the Washington, D.C., public affairs firm that lobbied Capitol Hill on behalf of XtremeSpectrum. "These companies are protecting their existing markets and their ability to go into future ones."
Indeed, UWB mightily threatens a number of existing markets. The 802.11 community will be in immediate danger, and Bluetooth, the emerging wireless standard for device-to-device communications, may be rendered obsolete before anyone actually gets to use it. But far more significant is the effect that UWB could have on the next-generation networks that mobile carriers have spent so lavishly on to develop over the past three years. "I believe the wireless carriers' objections really stemmed from a financial and a political perspective, more than from spectrum interference," says Martin Rofheart, the cofounder and CEO of XtremeSpectrum. At the current power restrictions delineated by the FCC, UWB is not yet approved for commercial use beyond networks of a couple hundred feet at the most.
