Ultra Wideband (UWB) is a wireless technology that is now becoming standard in the latest smartphones and other consumer electronics. Is it radar? 5G? Or is it how we can find our keys using AirTags?
I've read several articles in the tech blogosphere that have made some incorrect claims about UWB[1] and I want to clarify what it actually is, what makes it so special, and how it compares to other wireless technologies.
Ultra Wideband technology has been around since the introduction of radio transmissions when Heinrich Hertz proved the existence of radio waves in 1887 using his experimental spark-gap transmitter.
A century later, US government agency DARPA spent $25M researching Ultra Wideband for use in anti-stealth military radar. And in 2002, UWB became commercially viable when the FCC opened up 7.5 GHz of bandwidth for Ultra Wideband applications.[2]
After the FCC opened the floodgates for commercial development, big companies, startups, and VCs started pouring investment into UWB development.
The WiMedia Alliance was formed to promote the transfer of videos and other files using a technique called Multiband-[OFDM](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orthogonal_frequency-division_multiplexing#:~:text=In telecommunications%2C orthogonal frequency-division,data on multiple carrier frequencies.&text=In OFDM%2C multiple closely spaced,to carry data in parallel.) and after a couple of years, Intel was able to demonstrate Wireless USB. At the same time, the UWB Forum was also founded to pursue a competing architecture called Direct Sequence UWB.
But it wasn't quite catching on. In 2008, Dean Takahashi, reporting for VentureBeat[3], wrote: