From ranges of 3 meters to 30 kilometers, broadband wireless technology is poised on the brink of all but eliminating the cords binding millions of devices and the Internet. However, the high economic stakes inherent in creating and dominating any given niche of the wireless network are also creating challenges for standards bodies, notably the IEEE 802 group, which oversees protocol development for local and metropolitan area networks.

Two of the IEEE 802 groups in particular—the 802.15.3a task group, overseeing development of a wireless personal area network technology, and the 802.20 working group, overseeing development of mobile broadband wireless access—have been substantially bedeviled in recent months by infighting that has delayed research and product development in their respective sectors. The 802.15.3a group, which was exploring a standard for wireless universal serial bus (USB) technology, shut itself down in January 2006, after three years of wrangling over two distinctly different approaches to creating wireless connections between PCs, peripherals, and home entertainment equipment. In June, the IEEE standards board suspended the 802.20 group’s activities (pdf), after an internal investigation revealed “a lack of transparency, possible ‘dominance,’ and other irregularities in the Working Group.”

Standards and market factors

Underlying the debates are competing technologies that might or might not deliver some sort of market advantage. An IEEE spokesperson said the organization can’t make statements about market prognostications because doing so would be speculative. The spokesperson also declined to comment on technical differences that technologists and consumers might be able to study in charting their own development and buying decisions.

The infighting over the wireless USB technology led connectivity vendor Belkin to side with Freescale Semiconductor, which championed a backward-compatible, simpler, yet ultimately losing USB technology. Mark Freeman, senior product manager for Belkin’s Connectivity Group, says the political infighting “hurt the product from the standpoint that the standard was not being developed, and that hurt the technology as a whole.”

Meanwhile, the IEEE standards board has reinstated the 802.20 group (pdf) with new officers and a more comprehensive expectation of appropriate conduct and statement of affiliation:

The SASB has charged the non-conflicted members of the IEEE 802 EC to work with the new officers, once appointed, to identify and address any efforts to dominate the IEEE 802.20 Working Group, whether by affirmatively seeking to achieve a standard through domination or by deliberately blocking the development of a standard, and to submit a plan for approval to the SASB at its December 2006 meeting to ensure that dominance does not occur.

While the 802.20 reinstatement might include these tighter guidelines, Stephen Wood, president of the WiMedia Alliance, believes the IEEE must address significant shortcomings in its process. The WiMedia Alliance backed the technology that emerged victorious in the burgeoning wireless USB market after the 802.15.3a abandoned its effort. Wood says the IEEE hasn’t yet taken suggestions coming out of that group’s experience to heart.

“They, like any large organization, have an embedded inertia that’s proving very difficult to modify,” Wood says. “They seem to be taking a position of, ‘We’ve been producing excellent standards for years,’ and they’re absolutely correct, but they’ve gotten used to the idea that standards naturally will be jammed for two or three years, and some of us don’t take that as a given. We take that as a problem.”

In particular, Wood says the “one man, one vote” principle can prove problematic in establishing a standard, because companies with a vested interest in blocking a standard can pack a meeting with affiliated voters. Technical changes require a 75 percent supermajority, so relatively few voters can stall a near-consensus effort indefinitely. Wood says lowering that threshold to 60 or 66 percent could help prevent that parliamentary tactic. He also advocates revisiting what constitutes a legitimate voter. There’s an uncanny correlation, he says, between how a person votes in committee and who pays their way to the meeting.

The impasse over which direction to take wireless USB became so jammed that the companies in the WiMedia Alliance, which favored a multiband, orthogonal-frequency-division-multiplexing (OFDM) technology, opted to pursue standardization with Ecma International and the International Standards Organization (ISO). The contending camp, called the Ultrawideband (UWB) Forum, which favored a direct-sequencing technology, appeared to be headed straight to market without any subsequent standardization effort. Belkin had announced it was going to offer a wireless USB hub based on Freescale Semiconductor's proprietary direct-sequence technology, CableFree USB. But Freescale backed out of the UWB Forum after the IEEE decided to close the 802.15.3a effort.

Freescale has since abandoned its wireless USB effort, and in late September, Belkin announced it was going to offer wireless USB based on silicon from Intel, one of the WiMedia Alliance leaders. “We had always planned to release a Certified Wireless USB product,” Freeman says, referring to the compliance specification for the OFDM technology. “But felt we could get a jump on the market, gain market share, and get our name out there and be known as the leader in wireless USB, and that would help us transition into the Certified Wireless USB product.”

UWB has more to offer than USB

The UWB Forum is currently inactive, and the direct-sequencing technology, which offered less complexity for users but also less flexibility for developers, is considered dead for wireless USB purposes. However, Bruce Watkins, the president and chief operating officer of Pulselink, a start-up in UWB technology, says the company is keeping the UWB Forum name alive. He also says the tiff over wireless USB has obscured the original intent of the IEEE work from which it sprang. He contends that the news and discussion forums have given short shrift to the full complexity of UWB technology. As a result, Pulselink, which never pursued wireless USB, is fighting a perception that it, like Freescale, backed a losing horse.

“We never, ever, had the same technology or marketing plan as Freescale,” Watkins says. “There were different regulatory issues around the world, and we wanted to have a common voice if there were going to be different types of UWB—to have a place to discuss how these technologies would work, interoperability issues, and things of that nature. It really hasn’t ever changed our business plan or marketing plan.”

Watkins says the wireless USB argument was over different implementations of the 802.15.3 PHY layer technology, while the MAC layer remains a consensus standard for both current and future uses.

“The 15.3 MAC was specified before UWB was approved by the FCC, or before any UWB companies got involved in 15.3, and I can say that with authority because we’re the second UWB company that got involved,” Watkins says. “What it [the MAC] was originally set up to do was to operate with a 2.4 GHz carrier, just like WiFi, and was founded by a group of WiFi companies.”

Because WiFi (IEEE 802.11) was set up at that time to be wireless Ethernet, which is asynchronous, the original 15.3 group knew they needed an isochronous MAC “if they ever wanted to move video with guaranteed quality-of-service," Watkins says. “So, 15.3 was designed from the beginning to turn Internet traffic into isochronous traffic so QoS could be guaranteed.”

For the long term, both Wood and Freeman concur with Watkins that wireless USB represents just the first generation of short-range UWB technologies. All agree further that provisioning of spectrum in networks with an overload of devices might be the long-term sweet spot. And Watkins says the attention the wireless USB fight attracted might have been akin to that of drivers who find themselves enraptured by watching an auto accident that didn’t involve them.

“Look, Intel, which invented USB, wanted a wireless USB and they chose a way to get there,” he says. “End of discussion. If you want to build wireless USB, you build that. If you don’t, you build something different. That’s what we did—not that we’ve ever had an argument with Intel’s desire to have wireless USB. We just looked at it in early 2003 and saw there were going to be a dozen companies that wanted to do that, and only one or two would be successful in the long run; and we didn’t want to bet our futures on being one of them, because that wasn’t where we had expertise.”

Whither long-range broadband?

Industry observers might watch the reinvigorated IEEE 802.20 activities to ascertain whether the tighter conduct expected by the standards board speeds up the effort to bring products to market. Some participants say the 802.20 group seemed to be reaching consensus on OFDM as the foundation network technology when the IEEE standards board suspended its activity. Representatives from two major industry players believed the former group chair, who was officially an independent consultant, was favoring a rival's draft documents because of a financial relationship he had with the company.

To make the process more transparent, the standards board has decreed that IEEE 802.20 working group participants “must identify any person or organization that, directly or indirectly, has requested, paid for, or otherwise sponsored his/her participation.”

Roger Kay, president of industry analyst firm Endpoint Technologies, says such steps will be necessary for the IEEE to avoid becoming irrelevant in standards battles. “The IEEE is toothless in the face of major electronics companies with huge pockets, who will move forward, try to convince people they want their product, and later on will go to the IEEE and say 'All done,' ” Kay says. “And that doesn't do the market much of a service.”

Observers should have plenty of time to see if the revamped 802.20 process works. The technology is envisioned as a successor to 2G and 3G cellular networks, drawn from the ground up to be a packet-based network instead of a modified circuit switch-based network. Its main competition is expected to be mobile IEEE 802.16 (WiMAX); as even stationary WiMAX is still in its infancy, at least one analyst says the market will take a long time to sort this particular battle out.

“The carriers have already deployed 3G,” says Gabriel Brown, chief analyst for wireless analysis firm Unstrung Insider. “I don't think they have too much stomach to try anything else for a long time.”

Related Links

• DS Online's Mobile and Pervasive Community
• "UWB Standardization Effort Ends in Controversy," Computer
• "Ultrawideband as an Industrial Solution," IEEE Pervasive Computing