The products will sell into markets that Watkins says Wi-Fi can't satisfy -- though secure Wi-Fi equipment vendors such as Harris Corp. and Fortress Technologies might disagree. While Pulse-LINK would certainly sell its products into an enterprise market, he admits they will not compete well with standard Wi-Fi products.

"We're going to be more expensive than Wi-Fi solutions," he says. "Folks looking for something that Wi-Fi can serve will not be satisifed with our price points."

Watkins explains that although much has been made of the reduced engineering complexity of UWB, his company's technology, because it pushes the envelope, will not enjoy the economic benefits of that reduced complexity. "When you start doing the things we need to do to get the higher range, it gets kind of expensive," he says.

Wireless is Pulse-LINK's main focus at the moment, but the company is also working on technology for wired media, currently CATV (cable TV) wiring but possibly home electrical and telephone wiring in the future. Watkins claims the technology may be capable of hitting USB2 data rates -- 480 Mbps.

The wired technology may turn out to be a more serious threat to Wi-Fi, at least in the home market, than Pulse-LINK's wireless LAN products. Imagine a converged multimedia/consumer electronics device that could be automatically added to a wideband network just by plugging it in to a wall socket!

Pulse-LINK expects to have so-called "wired UWB" product no later than the end of 2005. The company hopes eventually to produce a single chipset that would enable both wired and wireless UWB networking products operating at different data rates and ranges.

Watkins is accustomed to fielding questions about which wireless technology is going to "win in the end" -- UWB, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, something else again. He says those questions won't be relevant for long. Emerging software-defined radio technology will create a grand convergence, making possible economical radios capable of transmitting and receiving using all three technologies -- and possibly others undreamed.

"We're working on it, others are working on it -- consortiums have been formed to work on it," Watkins notes.

He's also accustomed to nay-sayers, including from within the UWB world, who doubt his company can do what it says it can. They also doubted that UWB could work at all, he poins out, or that it would ever be approved by the FCC, or that the cellular powers that be would let it move ahead without a legal challenge. All of those things happened.

"It's not my job to convince them," Watkins says. "We're happy to have them believe [we can't do what we say we can] for as long as possible. It's only incumbent on us to bring the technology to market to prove it."