"Goodby, UWB, we hardly knew you", or: What happened to ultrawideband?

So what happened? Why has UWB crashed and burned?

I have no single theory or special insight; such punditry is cheap and easy and meaningless. But I suspect it was a combination, in hard-to-figure proportions, of several factors:

• It's not clear what actual market need UWB served
• A lot of the UWB enthusiasts were in it for their own self-interest (selling ICs, and related software), rather than to meet genuine end-user needs.
• Sometimes, the market simply can't handle another specification or proposal, even if well-intentioned; there's "new-initiative" overload and active resistance or, at the least, passive indifference.
• As with so many developments, UWB was overhyped by its proponents, and yet under-delivered. The message seemed to be "whatever your high-speed wireless connectivity problem, UWB is the answer." But, you have to read the "is" in that phrase as really being "may be", since there are a lot of unknowns here.
• Anytime you are dealing with wideband signals, and short pulses, you have regulatory issues on top of EMI/RFI and co-interference concerns that can't be ignored or waved away easily.
• There were (and still are) genuine technical, component, and operational issues related to a solid, reliable UWB design and protocol that can't be ignored or dismissed simply by wishful thinking.
• And we can't ignore that the costs of UWB were likely to be higher than the market could accept.

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