So what happens next? Do you wait for the next meeting?
There’s so much support for the MBOA. The number of companies backing it is growing, and they’re going off as if the confirmation had occurred. It’s not a formal organisation, just a collaboration of the sort that the IEEE encourages to help with the standardisation. Our current path is to continue developing this, and what makes it successful is people building products around it.
The key to success [of ultrawideband] is will industry adopt it? Can people build products? We don’t want to slow that down. The IEEE spec is just a radio spec, so we’re working with 1394, the Digital Home Group and others, all of whom have work going on with the rest of what’s needed to make UWB work.
There are reports that the MBOA standard can generate more interference, uses more power and is more complex than the alternative. Is that the case?
Our standard is fully compliant with the FCC published regulations -- in fact, it’s below the allowable limit on peak power. We generate less interference than something like a Gameboy or other electronic device. A certain limited set of receivers -- I hate the term, but it’s what we use, they’re called victim receivers -- that are very wideband are more susceptible to the impulse type of noise that our signal can look like. These are things like fixed satellite receivers.
The question is, what is noticeable interference? We do generate more [than the other proposal] in this one case but it’s only when, for example, the transmitter is right in line with the satellite dish. We’ve done simulations, and we wanted to see how well the testing worked, and the simulations matched our early tests. But the tests are inconclusive and ongoing. We’re trying hard to do good science.
[note: ZDNet UK asked again about power consumption, Manny did not address the issue]
