The FCC provides a UWB waiver.

As quoted from this article,

"The FCC's granting on Thursday of a waiver to the WiMedia Alliance set off spin campaigns from both UWB camps.

The recently-merged *WiMedia Alliance* and MultiBand OFDM Alliance Special Interest Group announced Thursday that the FCC has granted their request for waiver of certain measurement procedures for the multiband orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) standard for ultra wideband (UWB)."

The above article is then linked to this press release from Freescale.

Here is the relevant quotes from the press release,

"Relative to the original rules, under this waiver, DS-UWB can now enjoy 4x greater data rate across a network, or deliver a stream using 4x lower power from the battery, or deliver the same data rate across the network but at double the distance and with greater robustness. The capability to burst at 4x data rate over the same range, and “sleep” more, generates significant additional battery savings for the already very low power DS-UWB solution, an ideal benefit for future DS-UWB applications such as cell phones, digital camcorders and portable hard drives. As important, with a simple firmware update, Freescale’s current UWB chipset, the XS110, can now be re-certified to take advantage of the benefits of the new waiver and deliver multiple HD video streams at double the distance – up to 20 meters."

And also in the same press release we hear,

"Indeed, our aggressive UWB product roadmap will be further expanded in terms of data rate and range as we move to multi-gigabit products over the coming quarters.”

So let's see, we have a press release that is stating that Freescale will be releasing multi-gigabit radios capable of an effective range of just over 60 feet (with a potential of 4X the range) without the use of any high gain external antenna. Additionally, these chips are going to be mass produced for the PAN market and are expected to be sold in quantity pricing that is close to WiFi.

Now, if we could only use this legitimately in a mesh style network, we might really be on to something.