Ultra Wide Band (or wireless USB as it’s also, rather confusingly, known) becomes available from August 13th. So what you might ask; and if you do, you might well be right to be underwhelmed.

Some are heralding this as the technology that could hasten the arrival of the ‘connected digital home’; those of a more cynical bent (but possibly a more realistic one too) are pointing out that for the foreseeable future all it’s likely to do is remove the odd printer cable from people’s homes.

There’s already a plethora of wireless devices out there: wireless mice and keyboards, IR remote controls, Bluetooth mobile connections & wireless networking to name but a few. Will Ultra Wide Band (with its admittedly quite impressive 2 gigabits per second data transfer) really make that much of an impression with consumers who have already made the leap, so that it can become the next logical progression down this road?

At the end of the day it’s all going to come down to how well it’s marketed. It certainly has the potential to take off, given the right push. It could become the wireless standard, replacing the multitude of different methods we already have and allowing a greater level of interaction between different devices.

Or it could just stagnate, useful with only a handful of otherwise menial tasks where pre-existing wired interfaces are already satisfactory. This would be a real shame in my opinion, as providing a standard interface, especially one with the speed of UWB, would be a really postitive step.

It has a major obstacle to overcome however, and that will be in attempting to convince those people who already have wireless devices to replace these with UWB ones and to do so, it will need to provide facilities that people don’t or can’t have at the moment with existing technologies. And that, I think, is it’s potential wireless audio/video connectivity. Otherwise it will face the same fate that products in other markets have met when supposed advantages over existing ones have not been enough to convince people to convert; does anyone remember the Mini Disc?

Certainly, the thought of not needing to have so many cables in your house is a very nice thought and I look forward to the day I don’t need to have a spaghetti junction of Scart leads tucked away behind my TV.

You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.