erMAN wireless LAN standards, which will most likely be "signed into technological law" by spring 2005. Downloaded from Digital Engineering Library @ McGraw-Hill (www.digitalengineeringlibrary.com) Copyright © 2004 The McGraw-Hill Companies. All rights reserved. Any use is subject to the Terms of Use as given at the website. Access Technologies Chapter 6 And what of the continuing perspective that WiMAX competes with Wi-Fi? Most informed players argue that WiMAX is really a comple- mentary technology to Wi-Fi, particularly in the metro arena. They see it as a broadband wireless alternative to cable or DSL and believe that cer- tified WiMAX products will begin to appear in the enterprise market in mid-2005, while residential WiMAX products will provide solutions that are more cost-effective than fixed solutions in rural or greenfield areas. Ultra Wideband (UWB) Ultra wideband (UWB) technology is designed for short-range, wireless personal area networks (WPANs). It is a short-range radio technology that will be used to transmit data between devices over distances of as much as 30 feet, and is defined as a radio technology that has a spectral operating range that occupies a bandwidth greater than 20 percent of the center frequency, or at least 500 MHz. A UWB device transmits billions of electromagnetic pulses across a broad range of frequencies that are collectively several GHz wide. The receiver translates the received pulses into data by listening for a recog- nizable pulse sequence sent by the transmitter. Like Wi-Fi, UWB systems use OFDM to operate over these extremely wide spectral components. The technology's combination of broad oper- ating spectrum and lower power improves speed and reduces interfer- ence with other wireless systems. In the United States, the FCC has mandated that UWB radio transmissions be allowed to operate from 3.1 GHz up to 10.6 GHz, at limited transmit power. Consequently, UWB pro- vides dramatic channel capacity at short range that limits interference. So what are the applications for 