Haier demonstrated a UWB (Ultra-Wideband)-capable digital camcorder at a government-sponsored exhibition in Beijing. But the demonstration offered only a hint of UWB's potential.
UWB is a short-range wireless networking technology that permits high-bandwidth connections between various devices.
During the demonstration, Haier, of Qingdao, China, showed the camcorder streaming a live video file over a 20Mbps connection to a 40in plasma display with no distortion or latency.
The demonstration was made using DS-UWB (Direct Sequence UWB), a single-band variant of UWB which offers throughput of up to 114Mbps.
Haier's UWB demonstration hinted at the potential UWB offers for high-speed, short-range wireless connections but fell short of the higher bandwidth expected to be offered by UWB-based technologies currently in development.
Vendors including Intel are pushing faster multi-band UWB technology as an alternative to Bluetooth, which has a throughput of up to 1Mbps and is not well-suited to transferring large files, such as video, audio and pictures.
Multi-band UWB, which is expected to offer throughput up to 480Mbps, is also seen as a replacement for wired networking technologies, such as IEEE 1394 and USB.
Multi-band UWB technology transmits radio pulses in parallel over several spectrum bands. This offers higher bandwidth than single-band DS-UWB, which uses only band of spectrum at a time.
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