Amended from The New York Times:

ONE barrier that has held back the much-hyped convergence of the computer and consumer electronics industries has been the tangle of wires that is needed to connect the cascade of home video, audio, Internet and game gadgets.

Now the drive to unwire the living room is about to get a push.

In March, the Federal Communications Commission took a significant step toward breaking an industry deadlock over setting a single standard for a new wireless technology called ultrawideband, or UWB.

While traditional radio technologies have transmitted and received analog signals only on specific frequencies, UWB uses inexpensive computing power to send short radio pulses across much of the radio spectrum. Because it does not use a single frequency, UWB offers several advantages, including the capacity to send high volumes of information quickly and the ability to share frequencies and resist interference. It's like breaking a truck's cargo into loads small enough to be carried on bicycles that can weave through a traffic jam.