The short range wireless technology Bluetooth has always promised more than it delivered, and has been facing death at the hands of the emerging, and far faster, UltraWideBand (UWB) technologies. Now the Bluetooth community is poised to avoid that fate by converging its efforts with those of the leading UWB-based technology groups, and creating a future standard based on a UWB physical layer that will deliver higher data rates to Bluetooth customers, while preserving the advantages that the older spec has, such as its qualification program and brand. With a similar move mooted for another key short range IEEE standard, ZigBee, there is increasing likelihood that UWB will become the uniform physical layer for personal area networking from digital home…