Home/Technologies/Ultra-Wideband
TechnologyA coordinate, and whose it is.
UWB measures how long a radio pulse takes to travel, and turns that into geometry. Radar tells you someone is there; RFID tells you what passed a door. Only UWB tells you which tag is where — to within a few tens of centimetres.
Very short pulses, spread very wide.
Ultra-wideband transmits pulses on the order of a nanosecond, spread across at least 500 MHz of bandwidth. Hardware overwhelmingly operates in the 3.1–10.6 GHz region, which sits inside the wider range India permits — see below. The standard behind most positioning hardware is IEEE 802.15.4 high-rate pulse UWB, extended by the 802.15.4z amendment that added enhanced ranging and secure timestamping.
The bandwidth is the whole point. A short pulse has a sharp edge in time, and a sharp edge in time is what lets a receiver say this arrival is the direct path and that one is a reflection off the racking. Narrowband systems that estimate distance from received signal strength cannot make that separation, which is why their error grows in exactly the cluttered indoor spaces where positioning is worth having.
Three ways to get a distance.
All three are in normal use, and the choice is an engineering trade between tag battery life, infrastructure cost and how many tags the system has to carry at once.
The anchors are the system.
A UWB deployment succeeds or fails on anchor placement and survey. Three anchors in view is the minimum for a two-dimensional fix; four or more, spread in height as well as plan, is what makes a z estimate meaningful. Anchors in a straight line produce a geometry so poor that no amount of radio quality rescues it.
Anchor coordinates enter the solver as ground truth. An anchor recorded 30 cm from where it actually is contributes that error to every fix in its vicinity, permanently, and no filtering removes it. This is why we survey rather than estimate, and why we re-survey after building work.
A distance you can trust.
The 802.15.4z amendment introduced a scrambled timestamp sequence — a cryptographically generated pulse pattern the receiver knows to expect. Because an attacker cannot predict the sequence, they cannot forge an early arrival — which is what defeats distance-reduction attacks, the attempts to make a tag appear closer than it really is. (Plain relay attacks are beaten by time of flight itself: a relay adds delay, so it can only make the measured distance longer.)
This matters wherever a distance authorises something: a door that opens, a vehicle that unlocks, a machine that resumes because the operator is confirmed to be clear of it. If a measured distance is going to gate an action, the measurement has to be resistant to being spoofed.
Use it when the answer is a coordinate.
- Use UWB when a decision depends on knowing where something is to better than a metre, continuously, and when tagging the thing is acceptable.
- Use UWB when the answer has to keep up with the thing being tracked. Update rates from a few hertz for a parked asset to tens of hertz for a person or a vehicle are routine; the ceiling is air time, not the radio.
- Use UWB when the distance itself has to be trustworthy — because it is going to authorise something. See secure ranging above.
- Do not use UWB when a zone-level answer would do. If “it is in the store room” closes the work order, an anchor grid is expensive theatre.
- Do not use UWB when the thing you want to locate cannot reasonably carry a powered tag — a customer, a patient, a visitor.
Start with a site, not a specification.
Send us the space, what moves in it, and the accuracy the decision actually needs. We will tell you which of the three technologies fits, which does not, and what a first deployment would involve.