The other camp has said that ODFM isn’t so good at meeting differing international requirements…
It’s easy to make OFDM choose not to use bands, if that’s required. Spectral masks [the rules for how much power is acceptable on different frequencies] may be different in different countries, and OFDM makes that easy.
The last thing we want to do is generate radios that cause problems. Most UWB devices will have other radios in them, like 802.11a, and we don’t want to make that difficult. We can change this proposal as we develop it -- but we’re committed to the spirit as well as the letter of the FCC approval.
The advantage of OFDM is much more effective technology -- you get a lot of performance down that route. Does add a little bit of extra cost, but you don’t have the equivalent costs in the receiver. We’ve done analysis, you can really relax the OFDM construction requirements over systems such as 802.11a which also use it.
Will you make the intellectual property in your proposal available for everyone?
It’s clearly our intent to conform to open IP -- the standard will only be successful if people use it. There’s not enough margin on these components to worry about royalties and intellectual-property payments. Intel’s interests are in getting the standard as widely used as possible.
Pat Gelsinger [Intel’s chief technical officer] told us at the last Intel Developer Forum that come what may with the IEEE, Intel intends to continue developing its proposal and turning it into product. Will there be a standards war between you and Motorola/XtremeSpectrum?
The MBOA is going to continue to develop the specification, and we’d like to see the IEEE endorse it but that’s not necessary. We really don’t want to see the standards war. It’s conceivable that it’ll happen.
So you’re against a war, but you’ll continue to develop your standard come what may?
There’s broad industry support, and the broader that support, the more likely it is that this standard will be created.
