Patrick Mannion's page-one coverage of the IEEE's ultrawideband dust-up in Albuquerque in the Nov. 17 issue gave me that "deja vu all over again" feeling. The IEEE's 802 LAN/WAN group faced just such a battle 10 years ago over Ethernet.

A bout between the Fast Ethernet and 100VG-AnyLAN camps at a Denver meeting in 1993 ended with midnight sit-ins, shouting matches and chants of, "The LAN united will never be defeated!" Hewlett-Packard was accused of trying to ram VG through committee. But some participants in the Fast Ethernet were accused, and with justification, of unduly demonizing HP's Pat Thaler.

The IEEE awarded both Fast Ethernet and VG 802.x nomenclatures. Members of the plenary committee may have recognized the power of letting the market choose: The 802.12 Demand-Priority VG spec came out of the chute as a protocol of interest only to HP and partners and was obsolete within a year or two. Fast Ethernet, on the other hand, gained new life as a switched hub-based protocol and paved the way for Gigabit Ethernet and 10-Gbit Ethernet, along with promises of mid-life kickers.

Could the UWB community's multiband orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing and direct-squence CDMA camps similarly learn to get along until one dies out or both settle into niches? Certainly, within the 802.11 wireless-LAN worlds, different frequency bands and coding methods have learned to coexist within a common topology. Meetings of the 802.15.3a task group needn't be death matches.

Cynics might say that such an approach makes sense for Sunday school but that the Intel/TI Multiband OFDM and Motorola/Xtreme Spectrum CDMA camps already have shifted to a zero-sum game. Both said in Albuquerque that they would reject a standard comprised of dual physical-layer specs.

Hold on a second. There is diversity within 802.11, since all flavors are based on a predictable access-point-to-mesh topology. UWB can be used in a variety of point-point and point-multipoint applications, both serial and network-like. Who's to say OFDM won't reign supreme in one realm, with DS-CDMA being preferred elsewhere?

But to get to that point, all parties have to unclench their fists and (pay attention, Intel) send the lawyers back home.

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