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USB Going Wireless
NathanJ writes "Device Forge is running a technical whitepaper on wireless USB. The article states that 'Already there has been some progress with the definition of a WUSB specification with a targeted bandwidth of 480 Mbps. This specification maintains the same usage and architecture as wired USB with a high-speed host-to-device connection.' And that 'the WUSB host can logically connect 127 WUSB devices.' So what am I going to do with my Bluetooth desktop?"
Update Holy Deja vu batman... here is an earlier Slashdot article that I missed from 3 weeks ago. Oops.
Put it in the trash of course. Another victim of early adoption.
In Soviet Russia, articles before post read *you*!
here
Oh, wait, it's the same one.
Bluetooth will still live on in the Low Power applications.
Being called a dork on Slashdot must be like being called the retard in special ed.
on Off The Hook a while back. They were concerned because the name and address of the radio's website is WUSB.
*twitch*
what makes this different than bluetooth, and what really are the benefits of wireless keyboards and mice and stuff anyway? Sure, I can sit far away from the computer, but then i cannot see to read the monitor.
I think we gave them enough of a chance! C'mon, enough is enough....specifications dont matter if there's no product suppor....
I don't think this is the product for me... I plug in my MP3 player, Digital Camera, Scanner, Printer and Bluetooth Gizmo in from USB (My keyboard is also a mini-USB hub). None of those really have to be a distance from my Computer.
There are already solutions for people who want their Keyboard or Printer a distance away from their computers without wires. What would make these people use this solution?
- Jax
Were one step closer to Cartmans Trapper Keeper!
I read through the paper, but I don't remember seeing anything about how far the transmission would go. If it is being compared to bluetooth, is it 30 feet. Or is this something that could also take over WiFi and go hundreds of feet? I would love to have a home network with a +400Mbps bandwidth.
-- johntracy.com, because everybody else is wrong.
Uh, one of the reasons I like USB is that it's a POWERED connection. Are we going to be sending energy through wireless connections with this WUSB somehow? And how much lead suit protection do I need to wear to not grow a third eye or extra thumbs when using it?
Check out the best P2P sharing website: MEDIACHEST.COM
This specification maintains the same usage and architecture as wired USB
Well unless they've been reading a ton of Tesla, I would call it the same usage or architecture as wired USB. Because USB is not only data but power, and AFAIK, wireless power distribution is neither a commodity technology nor tested to be safe in close quarters with humans...
The impact is that now I will have to turn devices on and off, worry about batteries, and power cords. Best case is everything gets (expensive) AAAs. Worst case is everything gets a power cord. If I'm using wireless USB, why would I want a power cord? I mean I'm not too keen on trading plugging in one thing for plugging in another.
And I've used wireless mice. They become erratic way before the batteries die. I like my HIDs to be precise and reliable, thank you very much...
I am disrespectful to dirt! Can you see that I am serious?!
in compairison to standard wired USB.
Bluetooth is only useful for a very limited number of applications on a desktop computer (or even a laptop). A mouse, keyboard, and maybe a bluetooth cell phone or PDA (which very little people have). It's not worth the cost of having to buy a bluetooth setup or for manufacturers to include it on the motherboard.
If it had higher bandwidth then it could be useful for printers, scanners, mp3 players, hard drives, etc.
If wireless usb does provide the speeds they claim then it will be a huge success. The U in USB does infact standard for Universal, and that's what bluetooth needed to be really successful.
Oh and not to mention bluetooth support is awful in windows.
WUUSSSSSSB!
Sitting around, surfing the net.
True... true..
Awesome idea, 480Mbps wirelessly.
Security is going to be paramount here, but the spec says:
Wireless connections, on the other hand, due to environmental characteristics, may establish connection paths that are not obvious. In fact, it may not be obvious when a device is connected.
It goes on to suggest a remedy of configuring security at the time of installation. Should this technology exist in the future, that's going to pose a tremendous stumbling block to assume home users, where most USB device usage occurs, would do that. It's a step back from that plug-and-play that they're used to.
Does USB still have the limitation of dividing the bus' time evenly between all devices regardless of how much bandwidth they're using? I remember that that was one of the arguments in the USB 2.0 / Firewire flamewars.
If so, I'd keep my keyboard and mouse off the bus. Besides, there's no reason to throw away working hardware.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
So what am I going to do with my Bluetooth desktop?
Put it there in the corner, next to the Cordless Desktop, the Logitech one that used proprietary radio. Yeah, right there, next to the infrared keyboard.
The article looks like WUSB is oriented toward device-to-host communication. Bluetooth supports connections between many different kinds of devices. Phones and accessories are a natural here. (After all, Bluetooth originated with Sweden's Ericsson.)
My favorite Bluetooth application is moving camera-phone photos to my laptop. My second-favorite application is laptop-to-bluetooth-to-phone-to-GPRS-to-internet.
org.slashdot.post.SignatureNotFoundException: ewg
why do i keep burning coasters?
<Tech> what connection you using?
<Dumbass> wusb
<Tech> stop talking on your cordless phone while writing to CD
but then, how do you recharge it? My USB devices recharge when I wire them up, will WUSB be able to (eventually) do the same?
"I'm just here to regulate funkiness."
Go wireless USB! Now, with only a mere pringles can, I can "borrow" my neighbors printer, turn his keyboard satanic, and upload the latest Simpsons theme to his PDA!
:)
Joy
Karma: SELECT `karma` FROM `users` WHERE `userid`=138474;
I can only think of a few useful applications of this technology:
Web cams: You want to put in a camera to monitor the baby's room (or the driveway, or whatever). Provided the range is sufficient, this may be a decent way of handling it (though other means exist already).
Networking: It's higher-bandwidth than the current 802.11 standards. The question (as others have mentioned) is the range.
Laptop base stations: You can leave your devices plugged in for power, and you don't have to hook anything up when you bring your laptop into the room.
...be very afraid of the ensuing slew of pop up adds for WUSB X10 cameras.
It is easier to build strong children than to repair broken men. -Frederick Douglass
Last I heard the preliminary WUSB standard was quite lacking in terms of security. Steal your co-workers entire Mp3 collection in only 15 minutes!
More than my PC. Really, there aren't many external devices I have for my PC that don't require power and a rather easily managed cable thanks to convenient hubs.
What I *do* need is an easier time with my A/V setup. Swapping out components is bad but adding anything new is nightmarish. Deciding which devices should be analog, S-Video, optical, or digital coax is mind numbing. I'd hoped I could firewire everything together but that hasn't happened either, darn it.
Give me a receiver, DVD player, Tivo, consoles, TVs and speakers with WUSB and I'll be happy. Plug the buggers into a power strip and watch as magic happens and everything chats. Sure, It'll probably need a PAN ID of somesort to limit bleed between setups but dang, it'd make it so much easier to drop a DVD changer and another console or 3 into the setup.
I've been on slashdot so long I'm starting to get out of touch with the cool stuff if it ain't on slashdot.
From the whitepaper:
The above is certainly a requirement for WUSB to take off. However, it does not specify either a means or a method to achieve that goal.
Also, what is this bit about, "Higher levels of security involving encryption should be implemented at the application level?" Will we need to replace our applications with WUSB-Security Enabled (tm) apps?
Finally, long range WUSB coupled with the same level of understanding of, and dedication to, security consumers re: WIFI could make WUSB truly exciting.
Only Women Bleed (Sex, Sharia remix)
This brings up the question tho: Will wireless USB be plug and play (metaphorically speaking I guess)? I mean, will your WUSB hub detect devices in the area and automagically set them up? This could be interesting to see. Immagine WarUSBing.
"All it takes to fly is to hurl yourself at the ground... and miss." -D. Adams
Don't worry about it. I'm sure it's your first time, and it won't happen again.
For me, cordless will become useful as soon as they invent cordless power supplies. Why would I want a wireless desktop if I had to keep changing the batteries in everything?
Art Schools Dietzilla
Awesome idea, 480Mbps wirelessly.
I'm still waiting for USB to provide 480 Mbps with wires.
Could Someone please MIRROR my poor little Server before the /. effect breaks it
Bluetooth is well established in Europe so I don't see it disappearing all that soon.
I'm writing this on my laptop using WiFi to connect to my broadband net connection. Last weekend I stayed with my parents and used the same laptop via a bluetooth dongle and GPRS on my mobile phone.
I use bluetooth to sync that phone with the laptop and to transfer photos from the phone to the laptop.
On the drive home I noted many other drivers with bluetooth headsets on their ears. If I meet someone we exchange contact details via bluetooth. My housemate controls the MP3 player on her iBook from her phone using Bluetooth. I sync my phone to my PDA via Bluetooth.
I can see the usefulness of a high speed Bluetooth like system but there are applications that just don't need a faster connection and for them Bluetooth works just fine. Also, I'm not sure about the US, but in Europe it seems that Joe/Josephine Public have picked it up just fine and it's not restricted to geeks.
I can see
> Higher levels of security involving encryption
> should be implemented at the application level.
Basically this means that secure communications will be up to the vendors, since it's not part of the standard. What that means is that you can forget widespread compatibility. While BT has had its teething problems with compatibility, theoretically at least any headset should work with any phone. Using WUSB however that wouldn't be guaranteed at all, since each vendor could offer their own encryption implementation.
The article is also glossing over authentication, only stating that WUSB will use the same authentication as wired USB. What authentication?! AFAIK standard USB uses the tried-and-true authentication method of assuming that if it can talk to a device, it obviously must be connected to the bus, and since it's a physical local area bus, the person who plugged it in obviously had physical access to it and was thus "authorized". This particular chicken won't fly with WUSB, though.
My WIFI setup at home already clobbers my cordless phone, and my low-power light bulbs emit interference and clobber them both. Now I need to cram bluetooth and WUSB into the same spectrum?
Religion is a gateway psychosis. -- Dave Foley
People seem to be missing the point regarding bluetooth: it's most important characteristic (in my opinion) is it's low power consumption. This is what makes it so suitable for cell phones, pda's, headsets, etc.
In deciding whether WUSB will replace bluetooth, you need to compare the power consumption of the two, not just the bandwidth.
OK, I've got a (hypothetical) PC with WUSB printer, external hard drive, MP3 player, MIDI controller, and mouse. The only thing is, so does my roommate, and his is 2 feet from mine. So, it seems like either there must be some sort of setup involved (like telling the device which PC it's looking for) in which case the just-plug-it-in-and-it-works aspect of USB is negated, or else you're in for lots of high-speed device conflicts.
.5 seconds and then you're done. With the above multiple-device/multiple-PC scenario, it seems like it might be considerably more trouble to configure the devices themselves then to just plug 'em in and not worry about it. Are we really that lazy? Do we really need wireless *everything*?
And on the tinfoil-hat tip, what's to keep Uncle Sam from driving by on the street with a WUSB equipped laptop and scanning all my files on that WUSB external drive? If my cable modem is WUSB, what's to keep the govt from just watching
everything I do online ever?
And why, if I might ask, is this necessary? Is the 2 seconds you spend pluggin the cord into the device really that important? Is it really that hard to plug the thumbdrive into an actual USB slot? I mean, we don't complain about plugging our headphones into our walkmans. You plug them in, it takes
They will never stop until somebody makes the
I don't see it that way. Bluetooth is a great technology. It's slow speed do limit it's applications, but for you mouse and your keyboard and syncing up your cell phone and such, it works great and there is no reason to replace it. It is also low power, isn't it?
Bluetooth is heavily targeted toward telephony applications.
One thing that "IP guys" are constantly missing the importance of is the need to deal with timing in streaming applications. (The telephone people missed it too, when they initially went digital, and spent decades fixing it up after the fact. Their latest generation - SONET - is orgznized around clocking. "Synchronous" is even the first word in the acronym.)
Basic idea is that, when you're sending a real-time stream at a constant sample rate, if you have a common timing reference at the transmitter and receiver things are a LOT simpler than if you have to infer the timing of the transmitter at the receiver. Doesn't matter if you propagate it with the signal or both ends get it from a common source by some complicated path - just get them clocked alike to make the endpoints' jobs enormously easier.
Voice signals, for instance, play out fine if the clocks at the two ends are synchronized, but have annoying clicks if not. These clicks can be cleaned up by adding heavy processing - which trashes FAX and high-speed modem signals. But that means adding a DSP (or equivalent computation) for uncompressed signals, or extra DSP work if you already having one doing compression. This takes power, at a premium in portable applications, and extra (or faster) silicon, which can raise costs. And even then the result is usually not as good as if the clocks were synchronized in the first place.
Phone companies synchronize nearly everything in their networks to a common clock, especially the 8,000/second sample rate of the A-to-D conversion of the voice signals, and distribute digitized voice (when uncompressed) as 64 kbit signals (8,000 8-bit samples per second.)
Bluetooth is organized around this. Time is broken up into 16,000 slots per second, with the master and the slaves taking turns - 8,000/second each. (What a conincidence that it's the voice sampling rate, eh?) The master sets the timing. The number of active slaves is limited, but a slave can extend the net to more active devices by becoming the master of a subnet. This makes little sense for net organization, but perfect sense if the slave is propagating timing from the master. Channel allocation within the net includes a fat general-purpose data channel plus three constant-rate bidirectional 64Kbit channels. (I.e. three phone calls.) A slave can participate in two separate nets - and can terminate all three 64K channels if in one net, or two of 'em if one is from each.
What this means is bluetooth is perfect for things like wireless headsets for cellphones. The cellphone provides a clock to the headset to set its sample rate, and the headset sends and plays out uncompressed audio. So the headset requires no DSP, little silicon, and little power. (The Bluetooth modulation scheme also makes for a simple, low-power, DSP-free radio.) The cellphone already has a DSP for compressing audio on its way to/from the net. It can in principle propagate network clocking to the handset, making things better end-to-end. Or it can just use its local clocking to make headset/DSP communication easier.
So Bluetooth makes design of cellphone audio peripherals nice. Cheaper, lower power, longer battery life, lighter weight, compared to any of the other schemes which don't propagate a phone-network or piconet-local timebase accessable beyond the network stack and/or require heavy DSP processing to work at all. Thus it's unlikely cellphones will be moving away from it any time soon - and when they do they'll probably move to something else that also propagates clocking. Since bluetooth can also handle a moderately-fast data link for WAN traffic, you get wireless internet connection throu
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Basically UWB is a nasty piece of work that's being rammed through with corporate pressure and by lobby groups set up by manufacturers. Now that Intel has signed on and indicated it intends to make it ubiquitous, we're pretty much doomed. It seems to have passed certification in the US, but with any luck it won't pass in Europe. It'll hopefully go the way of broadband over powerlines - everyone finally figures out it's just a bunch of snake oil salesmen pedalling faulty goods.
WirelessUSB isn't meant for keyboards and mice really. It's built around attaching storage and other high-speed current-USB devices without all the damned wires. Just think, that FireWire or USB2.0 harddrive you have won't need the wire anymore. You won't have to find plugs in certain areas or string wires through hoops anymore. As more wireless adds on, the mess under my computer (and some others in the office) gets smaller. Things are getting better. I just wish they'd stick with one F'in standard. Why can't this be Bluetooth 2.0 so that all my current bluetooth stuff still works? It sure would be nice. But no, I'll have bluetooth plus WUSB at some point. Oh great, another piece of hardware to buy!