In an Ultrawideband Planet article yesterday, I looked at the effect of small businesses of Freescale's apparent withdrawal from ultrawideband (UWB):

Jim Houskeeper is CTO of nVision Industries, which makes helmet-mounted displays and virtual binoculars. All of the company's products currently use a wired connection to a video source, and Houskeeper says nVision frequently gets requests from customers for a wireless option.

A couple of years ago, nVision got in touch with Freescale, as well as companies like Belkin and Gefen that were promising wireless USB hubs based on Freescale's silicon, to explore the possibility of using Freescale's UWB tech to unwire nVision's products.

Houskeeper says the companies kept saying solutions would be available in a matter of months.

But then the WiMedia Alliance began working with Ecma International to establish a global standard based on WiMedia's version of UWB - after which all parties involved agreed to dissolve the IEEE's UWB standards group. Then Freescale left the UWB Forum, after which they pushed back the anticipated arrival of their UWB silicon to 2007 at the earliest, if ever.

For nVision, that delay has hit hard - the company had planned its schedule around a conservative expectation that it would have a wireless solution by the end of the year. "We're a relatively small company, and this puts us in an even more difficult position in that we're not talking about quantities of 10,000 or 100,000 units," Houskeeper says. "As a small guy, we're pretty low on the food chain."