The MultiBand OFDM Alliance (MBOA) consortium has announced that it will be unveiling its plan for the physical layer of an Ultra Wideband specification, known as the PHY, next week at the Intel Developer Forum in San Francisco. It also expects to have finalized the MAC layer, the primary network "intelligence" part of the specification, by the end of the year.

Ultra Wideband is a high-speed radio technology that is still being finalized by the IEEE under the 802.15.3a specification. Various companies are currently competing to have their technologies included in the standard. The MBOA includes Intel, Alereon, Hewlett-Packard, Texas Instruments, and various others. A competing proposal from Freescale Semiconductor and Motorola was recently put forward as well, with both sides naturally claiming to have the better design. The IEEE is still debating the merits of both.

The MBOA has already started going forward with its own proposal, however, setting up agreements with other special interest groups in order to push its own proposal before the IEEE settles on a specification. Still, it hopes that eventually the IEEE will take over the specifications once they've been adopted.

The MBOA claims that both IEEE 1394 "FireWire" and USB protocols will be supported on top of their underlying UWB framework, allowing for faster and easier adoption.