The best way to kill a promising technology is to argue about it in standards bodies.

That's why UltraWideBand hasn't come to market yet. The technology works, but there are two ways to implement it.

• One path is offered by the Intel-led WiMedia Alliance, supporting something based on OFDM, a technology already-implemented in newer WiFi standards.
  
• The UWB Forum is concentrating on gaining members in China and Japan, supporting something called Direct Sequence-UWB. (That's the UWB Forum logo to the left.)
  

The technical merits of these two solutions is beyond my expertise. The plain fact is that they continue to argue, and now that we're ready to roll out product users will have to choose which side to support.

Most will simply choose to support neither. And by the time one side muscles the other out of the marketplace, there may not be much of a market worth competing for.

The loss of UWB as a technology would be shameful. The idea behind it is to re-use existing frequencies by pushing data under the noise floor, giving new life to already-licensed frequencies. You're talking about doubling the capacity of every hertz, and offering truly incredible speeds to boot.

The only people benefitting from this fight are those who have frequency licenses. Those licenses act as a monopoly against broadband competition, or at least they have. Unlicensed spectrum and UWB promise to open things up.

So you know who has the motive here. Did they also have the means and opportunity?

That's a story worth doing, because this argument is systematically killing a valuable technology offering, keeping down growth, and pushing people who want broadband into the arms of a shared monopoly.