Subject: [NEXTEL-1] Motorola vs. the Rest of the World: Fighting the Ultrawideband Battle

From: Marcelrf <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 22 Mar 2004 14:12:30 -0500

Motorola vs. the Rest of the World: Fighting the Ultrawideband Battle

The possibility of obtaining consensus on a single Ultrawideband (UWB)
standard for Wireless Personal Area Networks (WPAN) has virtually
disappeared, finds industry analyst ABI Research. There are two
standards on the table: one proposed by Motorola and a couple other
players, and the other proposed by nearly all the remaining industry
heavyweights, including Intel, Texas Instruments, Philips, Microsoft,
Fujitsu, NEC, Hewlett Packard, Infineon, and STMicroelectronics.

This is not the first time a company singularly attempted to drive a
technology against massive opposition. In the 1990s Qualcomm
successfully achieved this with CDMA for digital cellular. Qualcomm won
that battle, and it is noteworthy to examine three significant parallels
that may be drawn between these efforts:

1.Qualcomm's pioneers were not proposing an unknown or exotic technology
-- CDMA had been used by the military for close to 40 years;

2.The company relentlessly played up a few key benefits of CDMA over and
over again until finally even the operators took notice; and 3.Qualcomm
did not have to worry about interoperating with systems other than its
own.

Will the UWB camp with Motorola at its helm be able to pull off a
similar feat? These players have the advantage that the technology on
which their standard is based, DSSS (direct sequence spread spectrum),
is a well-understood technology and has been used in other wireless
areas for many years. They have constantly been claiming a couple of
benefits, including FCC interference compliance under any and all
interpretations, and a significant time-to-market advantage over the
competition . But what about the last point: Will the UWB solution for a
WPAN have to interoperate with all other WPAN networks?

It is one thing to win the standards battle, but it is another thing to
win the customer war. Other questions remain: Would an OEM choose the
DSSS UWB solution even at the expense of losing interoperability? Is it
possible that an OEM may decide to differentiate their product by
offering a 100 Mbit multimedia data rate before any of their competition
by using the DSSS UWB?

These questions and others are answered in ABI Research's report,
"Ultrawideband: Standards, Technology, OEM Strategy, and Markets &
Applications Spaces," which details OEM strategy, technology comparisons
and ABI Research's predictions for the next few months regarding the two
factions' market moves, engineering design challenges, the difficulties
on the road to convergence, and the long-term vision of the FCC. The
report also examines the global trends in shipments, ASPs, and revenues
in 18 different end-use markets, and profiles some of the key players in
these spaces.

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