UWB location beside Wi-Fi

Ultra-wideband tells you where a tag is, often to within tens of centimeters. Its most common channel sits inside the 6 GHz Wi-Fi band, it transmits at very low power on unlicensed terms, and a position is not a safety function.

What it is

The FCC defines a UWB transmitter by width: at least 500 MHz of bandwidth, or a fractional bandwidth of at least 0.20¹. The FiRa Consortium, the industry group behind interoperable UWB, describes channels about 500 MHz wide carrying pulses of about 2 ns². Two radios measure distance by time of flight, timing the round trip of a challenge and a response.

IEEE 802.15.4z, approved on June 4, 2020³, added coding options and improvements to increase the integrity and accuracy of ranging, plus MAC support for time-of-flight ranging. IEEE now lists the amendment as superseded.

A location system has two halves: fixed anchors at known positions, and tags on what you track. On a vehicle, onboard tags range to static anchors, and a filter fuses those ranges with odometry. The FCC credits UWB with determining distance and direction more precisely than narrowband technologies such as Wi-Fi and Bluetooth. That precision is the reason to run it beside Wi-Fi.

U.S. rules

UWB runs under Part 15 Subpart F, and like every Part 15 device it must accept any interference it receives. Two categories matter on a plant floor.

Indoor systems must be capable of operation only indoors, stay within 3.1 to 10.6 GHz at an average of -41.3 dBm/MHz EIRP⁴, and transmit only when sending information to an associated receiver.
Hand-held devices may operate indoors or outdoors but may not use fixed infrastructure, and must stop within 10 seconds unless the receiver acknowledges⁵.

Vehicles fit awkwardly. The FCC has fielded waiver requests for vehicle and rail ranging and other precision tracking, and a 2025 joint petition asked it to widen the hand-held category to non-fixed, affixed and vehicle-mounted devices.

Channel 5 sits in the 6 GHz Wi-Fi band

The FCC opened 5.925 to 7.125 GHz⁶ to unlicensed use. UWB channel 5 sits near 6.5 GHz⁷, which FiRa calls the center of the 6 GHz Wi-Fi spectrum, with a chance of interference between the two radios⁸. Channels 8 and 9 sit next to the 6 GHz band without overlapping it. Channel 9, near 8.0 GHz, is the only channel FiRa makes mandatory.

The power gap is large. A low-power indoor Wi-Fi access point may radiate 5 dBm per megahertz. Indoor UWB is held to -41.3 dBm/MHz. UWB is by far the quieter neighbor.

Testbed work shows what that gap does. A 2022 study found Wi-Fi 6E transmissions can largely disrupt UWB communication and reduce both the accuracy and the precision of ranging. Its authors proposed physical-layer choices, tight synchronization, and detecting Wi-Fi 6E traffic to postpone UWB transmissions⁹. UWB also crowds itself: an industrial study found co-channel interference and spectral overlap between UWB links can severely degrade performance.

Field note. Bot and AGV density is rising across industries and is saturating channels. 6 GHz is being deployed to relieve utilization.

If your location system uses channel 5, plan it and your 6 GHz rollout as one project. The 6 GHz guide covers the Wi-Fi side.

Accuracy: claims and measurements

FiRa states that UWB delivers accuracy down to a few centimeters at 99.9% reliability under normal conditions, and about 30 cm at 95% on a factory floor, with up to 100 m of range in line of sight. Those are an industry group’s claims.

One 2026 study put UWB on a commercial logistics AMR in a warehouse and fused it with odometry. It reached an absolute trajectory error of 18 to 36 cm¹⁰. Raw ranges showed a constant bias of up to 1.19 m on one tag and anchor pair. A tag mounted low suffered from poor line of sight and multipath, and the robot needed at least two anchors in direct line of sight of two onboard tags. Idealized lab setups cited by the same study report median errors below 6 cm.

Ask for accuracy at a stated percentile, in a building like yours, with your racking and your mounting heights.

The FCC has proposed new UWB rules

The FCC opened ET Docket No. 26-245 on September 9, 2026¹¹ and released a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking in it on October 1, 2026¹². It proposes a new category for compact devices, mobile or fixed, indoors or outdoors, with height and mounting limits, duty cycles under one percent in any 24-hour period, transmission only during active sessions, and no wide-area networks. It asks whether such deployments should be limited to controlled environments such as industrial or manufacturing facilities. It also revisits a transmitter definition that, by the FCC’s account, many modern devices fail, which has left the agency regulating by waiver. Comments are due 30 days after publication in the Federal Register.

It is a proposal. Today’s rules still govern your tags and anchors.

Beside Wi-Fi

UWB answers where. Something still has to carry that answer to the fleet manager, and on a vehicle that may be the Wi-Fi radio. Count location updates in your airtime budget like any other traffic.

A position is not a safety function

IEC treats safety integrity as a property of a safety function, whose functionality comes from hazard analysis and whose performance comes from risk assessment. A location feed from an unlicensed radio is an input that must accept any interference it receives. Wi-Fi 6E traffic can degrade its ranging accuracy. One attack study spoofed a 12 m distance down to 0 m on commercial HRP UWB chips, succeeding up to 4% of the time¹³.

Where a vehicle stops, and how fast it may travel near people, comes from the machine builder’s risk assessment and the safety functions it rates. A location system is not one of them because it is accurate.

What to ask a vendor

Which UWB channels each tag and anchor supports, and whether the system can run on channel 9 alone.
Which Part 15 section, or which waiver, each device is certified under.
FiRa certification status, if interoperability matters to you.
Accuracy at a stated percentile, measured in a building like yours, with anchor density and mounting heights.
What the system reports when a tag loses its fix, and how fast.
Measured performance with 6 GHz Wi-Fi active on overlapping channels.
Whether ranging uses the 802.15.4z integrity features, and how anchors reach the location engine.

UWB tells you where a vehicle is. It does not decide whether that vehicle stops.