Will UWB Succeed In Spite Of Its Standards Battles
The ridiculous and completely unnecessary UWB standards battle doesn’t show any signs of getting cleared up any time soon — but that won’t stop the various contenders from starting to come out with incompatible, non-standardized hardware. Glenn Fleishman has a nice writeup for Mobile Pipeline looking at the state of UWB today, including the standards issue. What’s interesting, is the question of whether or not UWB can succeed in spite of the standards battle. Obviously, having a single standard that everyone could rally around would probably be a better solution — but with heavy marketing and various relationships, some believe that the world will just be fine with at least two different kinds of UWB (coming out under different brand names, of course). While it’s likely to eventually succeed, just because the technology is too useful not to succeed — it still seems like this standards problem will slow stuff down. It already has stalled out some efforts over the past few years, but vendors now need to figure out which one to support, if any, and that could seriously slow down adoption. People will need to make sure the products they buy are actually compatible, and vendors may shy away from placing bets until a “winner” is clearer. UWB is a great technology, but so far, the various companies backing it have done a lot of things very badly in trying to get it to market.
