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An Introduction To Wireless USB (WUSB)
An anonymous reader writes "This technical whitepaper by Rafael Kolic, a technology marketing manager in Intel's Corporate Technology Group, introduces Wireless USB (WUSB) and explains how it will impact device performance and mobility. The latest iteration of USB technology, WUSB will offer the same functionality as standard wired USB devices -- but without the cabling."
I really enjoy being able to power most of my devices over USB and not having to have an extra plug and/or wallwart to deal with. I for one would much rather keep wired usb and forgo the power adapter, than wireless usb and have to deal with yet another plug to have to find power for. I know most of you probably are already running fire hazards as it is now.
Tis better to be silent and thought a fool, than to open your mouth and remove all doubt --Abraham Lincoln
I can only hope and pray that wireless USB will be very very secure. The thought of someone with a nice high-gain cantenna and a datalogger is none to comforting.
I can also see all many nasty opportunities for system flakyness when a computer gets intermitt-tt-ttant contacts with other wireless USB devices and tries to establish a connection.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
No thanks.
I've had bad experiences with wireless. I'll be sticking to wired devices for years to come yet.
One of the biggest advantages of USB is the power that flows through it. I just plug in my mouse, webcam etc and no bulky adapters required. Theyve also been around since the days of the Pentium1, and you can be sure a USB drive will work many places.
Now wireless.... you'll need batteries or adapters, wont work just everywhere and you'll have to pay motherboard makers to build it in.
Not too many people need short-range wireless interfaces outside of the 802.11a/b/g, which is different
"Give orange me give eat orange me eat orange give me eat orange give me you." -Nim Chimpsky
Auto-reply to ACs: "Truly, you have a dizzying intellect."
Everybody knows what it means (or what they think it means) and how to use it.
Even if this WAS just Bluetooth with a new name, it would become the odds-on favorite to replace Bluetooth.
If Bluetooth had the kind of mindshare that USB does, there would be little room for a replacement.
It doesn't. there is.
Adoption of bluetooth technology has been very slow though. And since this would most likely see implementation on motherboards it is very likely to be bluetooth's successor if it actually ever enters production.
And now if we could just develop wireless power for all these wireless devices... other than batteries, of course. ;-)
...or the power
I gusee you could say USB(2) is to firewire what WUSB is to Bluetooth. (W)USB are host-based where firewire and bluetooth are host independant.
Develop, publish and promote the preferred short-range wireless specification for connecting mobile products.
And if you read this "introduction" it's CLEARLY positioning WUSB for things like in-the-home high-capacity connectivity for devices where you're rather not have wires (eg HomeTheater, they specifically talk about bandwidth consumption of HDTV streams etc).
Very muchly *not* what BlueTooth is aimed at.
Visit CryptoGnome in his home.
It's kinda interesting because if you look at the wireless tech we have now, nothing wired equated to Bluetooth:
Serial > USB > WUSB
Ethernet > WiFi
??? > Bluetooth
Bluetooth is a much smarter protocol that allows you to build a PAN - something you'll need if you have 2 PCs with WUSB in the same vicinity...
maybe WUSB stands for Wireless Ultra-Smart Bluetooth or something, but to all intents and purposes, it sounds like choice is getting in the way of standards again... *sigh*
By the time this ships maybe the mouse pad will be a power pad.
Also, this is designed to compete in a different space. While it can do the things that Bluetooth does, it's also designed to be used by hard drives and other devices that require MUCH more bandwidth than is available with Bluetooth. Maybe when it's updated, but right now you just couldn't use it for a hard drive or to connect your 5MP digital camera.
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
Also, it ensures an old PC is forward compatible with new WUSB peripherals, as you can get a WUSB hub for wired USB. No new motherboard/PCI cards required.
For instance, you could put a WUSB hub on each floor of your house. Now your WUSB webcam can be moved around the whole house streaming video to your PC. That's pretty cool.
It doesn't make sense to "kill" bluetooth. The standard is there, although broken in some respects. Plenty of devices have started to use it. For it's purpose of low power use and simple connectivity, it has things going for it. Bluetooth's only real issue has been cost. When I can buy a bluetooth card for $220 or a lan card for $99, which do you think someone will invest in? However, consider the issue of the exploding WAN market. Everyone's battling over who makes 801.11b, g, and whatever new variant that comes along (dual channel, etc.) The single greatest problem with WAN is that you've got the idea of connectivity, but not the bandwidth or the standard for device connection for high bitrate media. I can buy a Wi-Fi DVD/Dixv/MP3 player, but I have to have the company's specific software to use it and I have to have the local network configured correctly. What would happen if you started with USB and added in your own wireless spec? You start with a device model that everyone has already agreed on and can instantly support plug-and-play device detection. They can by-pass the politics of getting an agreed upon standard networking protocal since it is not trying to tie into ethernet. They can just create a virtual networking device driver and route it over USB and we have 480 Mb wireless networking. Intel could easily become the dead center of media-centric, wireless conectivity.
Bel, the mostly sane.. "Of course I can't see anything! I'm standing on the shoulders of idiots." -- Me
so what are we looking at here? wifi without the tcp/ip layer? cant they just use wifi and hotwire the usb protocol on top?
if this is going into the cellphone then forget it, its shooting birds with warship guns time. i dont have anything on my cellphone that needs that kind of transfer speed. maybe those pda/cellphone hybrids need them but they allready have wifi.
so end of story is, bluetooth for address book, wifi for files.
comment first, facts later. http://chem.tufts.edu/AnswersInScience/RelativityofWrong.htm
You're missing the point. USB should never have happened either. Firewire already existed, was better, faster, and UBS didn't address anything that firewire didn't do at least as well. (And for many things, Ethernet might have been a better choice than USB too). But we got USB shoved down our throats. Of course, many of use still needed firewire adapters, and the USB built into my expensive notebook is pretty much worthless since it's USB 1.1 (too slow to talk to many devices like external hard drives or DVD/CD writers at a reasonable speed). No one but Microsoft and Intel wanted USB 1.1, but we got it. No reasonable person wants wireless USB (bluetooth and the 802.11x protocols each do better in their own areas and we certainly don't need WUSB interfearing with them), but you're going to get it.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
Haha!
... hahaha ... a Red Alert defense system in my living room! :D
Yeah, the wireless power thing is a bit of a problem.
Actually, I'd be happy if manufacturers could just stick to a standard for DC power, then you could buy DC power converters with multiple outlets.
Still I have visions of Tesla coils arcing across the room and frying random parts of the house
Doesn't this lose the main advantages of USB: Devices drawing power from the bus, and high speed? Give me Bluetooth over this anyday.
These, of course, being things that Bluetooth brings to the table...
WUSB does actually bring high speed with it, whereas Bluetooth, as far as I know, is relatively low speed. WUSB's target is 480MBit, which is pretty fast for wireless.
And I'd like to hear your suggestions for getting wireless power.
1) powered wusb devices?
typical usb devices can be powered by the line, I see no current system be spoken of to use the wireless signal for power.
keep in mind that the recieved signal in % is the same as the power output of the hub/host/whatever. so a 100mw access point can deliver 60mw of power to a device that has 60% signal. Their is no reason that this power could not be used to power a device, like a tv remote control or power switch for a light. most devices could leech the 60mw of power(if thats what they receive!) and charge a small battery so that they have a little more power when needed. This would be usefull for night lights or something but still not enough power for a printer. speakers would be a definite no.
Although I would prefer to just power speakers off of the nearest power outlet, it doesn't completely elimintate the need for a wire. Game Controllers can use battery power and have a charging cradle and that would work well.
2)Wireless HDTV, component systems, speakers, etc
Some people are asking why this is usefull. here you go.
a)Simple setup with no routeing of wires, not rats nest behind your tv, lessened fire hazard of components.
b)zero tear-down time for moving the system. again, no speaker cables, video cables etc.
c)instant device assignment with no cable rearanging. for example: i walk the the living room with my laptop and set it on the coffee table, I can gain control of the speakers in the room and have full use of them for a game or some mp3s. I could also have access to the video and play some mpegs from it.
3)802.11 too slow? wusb ethernet adapters. Walk in the living room and have a WIRED Gigabit ethernet to the hub, and then 480Mbit via the wusb. 802.11g's 55Mb is pretty insignificant here.
4)wusb dvd-rw drives. have a single dvd-rw in the room, and have direct access to it via wusb. Now everymachine in the room can have direct access to it and be able to burn via nero or comprable software. current networking only allows the machine with physical access to it use the device in that manner and only linux with NBM could possible route hardware access over the network, and i'm not sure that's possible.
5)not to mention the options available for NAS(network attatched storage). some newer motherboards can boot from usb devices, so you could theoretically boot any number of machines across the 480Mb link(60MBytes/s) and not have drives in every machine, AND you can have a single CD-Rom drive to use in any number of machines. You could boot and entire cluster of machines up off a single cd-r and hard drive. AND you could have 480Mb networking on another channel and have disk-free systems.
AND I HAVEN'T EVEN GOT WARMED UP YET! the posibilities are nearlty endless. so yes, this absolutely destroys bluetooth in EVERY area accept power usage.
Someone (Toshiba? Micron?) was working on a power-generating notebook keyboard a couple of years back. I'm not sure if it ever resulted in a product. Each key had a little coil that generated a tiny current over its travel. It wasn't supposed to be enough to actually power the computer, just lengthen battery life, but might be enough for a wireless Bluetooth keyboard. Depending on the type of work, and the typist I suppose. ;)
For the mouse, your best bet would probably be a flywheel or gyro type arrangement similar to a self-winding watch. Kind of like one of those cool gyro-sensing mice in reverse.
There are other sources of energy available, of course, like heat from human hands, ambient light, etc. Anyone can come up with something that barely works for a patent application; making it cheap enough to be ubiquitous is the tricky bit.
I believe it. When the cordless phone (sitting next to my PC rings), my cordless keyboard refuses to work. I also read somewhere cordless phones use 2.4Ghz, and have far greater signal strength.
I can't comment on the speed decrease of my wireless network yet, since I only connect to my dial-up router across the apartment (which is where worst possible location for the only phone socket happens to be located).
Although it's quite a distance to my WAP, I do have line of sight. I'm sure that helps quite a lot.
It's GNU/Linux dammit!
> WUSB will offer the same functionality as standard wired USB devices -- but without the cabling."
Except that my mouse for example takes power from the usb bus which is impossible with wusb.
pretty big loss of functionality to me...
That would be cool.
Always going forward, 'cause we can't find reverse.
How about a coil in the mouse, and magnets in the mousepad? Fits in pretty well with the optical no-moving-parts philosophy and it generates the electricity pretty directly (straight out the coil). I think you might also need a capacitor to hold a reserve so you can get instant response whenever you start moving the mouse.
If nobody's already patented this... well, I call prior art!
An even cooler idea would be to run both 12VDC and 240VAC throughout the house. A lot of devices people run now days run on low voltage DC. Think battery chargers, computers, LED lighting, routers, flat screen TVs, clocks, radios etc etc. I reckon I run more DC devices than AC ones and I have tens of inefficient AC-DC power supplies to prove it.
Ultraviolet mousepad, and a solar panel on the bottom of the mouse?
You can get rechargeable cordless mouses quite commonly, and with USB allowing you to have several plugged in you could use one while the other is charging...
Do you relize the size and cost of copper cable that you would have to run around the house to provide decent wattage? Besides if you going to do something like that why not bit the bullet and run power over ethernet and kill 2 birds with one stone. You would have gigabit eithernet and enough wattage to run a lot of smaller devices (12 watts and change on cisco if memory serves) I say thing because running DC power in a daisy change to outlets would require some beefy cable at 12 volts as in you need ten times the amperage ish vs your current AC.
I do agree that 240 would be a better power standard I run my computers and racks on it. But again it's maily because you can get 2 times the wattage on the same wire.
No sir I dont like it.
No; when it comes to infrastructure, standards are a good thing. You can complain about monocultures all you want, but for infrastructure -- a category I am using to describe things like the language you speak, the voltage coming to your house, the broadcast standard encoding your TV signal -- uniformity is good.
New wireless standards should be introduced because they provide added functionality and can be reasonably expected to eventually replace the old standard; not just for diversity of choice.
With all that said, I think bluetooth's drivers are so miserable and its range/speed/power consumption such a poor choice that I'm ready to send it to the scrap heap. A zigbee/wifi breakdown seems like a much better solution to me than a compromise wireless standard that's not only slow and short range, but uses too much power to be left on all the time on mobile devices.