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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.
Were one step closer to Cartmans Trapper Keeper!
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?!
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").
why do i keep burning coasters?
<Tech> what connection you using?
<Dumbass> wusb
<Tech> stop talking on your cordless phone while writing to CD
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?
WUSB on the other hand is FAST. It seems like a waste to use it for a keyboard or mouse. That said, it will work great in those areas where BT is too slow. Wouldn't it be great to set your iPod next to your laptop and have it sync up all the songs in a few seconds? Or to print wirelessly (BT does this, but if you wanted to print a photo it would be slooooooowwwwww). Want a new hard drive? Set it next to your computer and it works. Same thing with that new camera you got that has WUSB. Just keep it near your PC and you can get your pictures with no wires. How about a wireless soundcard? Or even a (he he he) wireless USB wireless network adaptor! The idea of having a flash key thing built into your watch is nice, but imagine if it was WUSB! Just walk up to any computer and thanks to WUSB you have access to the files that are on your wrist without any cables or anything else (after a password for security or something, of course).
And because WUSB supports limited P2P stuff (IIRC), you could move your iPod next to your WUSB hard drive and have them sync without the computer (after all, all the data is in the iTunes database files) or have your camera download the pictures to your hard drive, or print your pictures without a computer or wires. For things needing high bandwidth, WUSB is the way to go. For many other things, BT is still great.
Now you can find many of those things I listed above with BT right now. There are BT printers, a BT camera,, and more. But while BT works for low bandwidth things, trying to move pictures from a camera to your PC through BT is supposed to be agonizingly slow. I wouldn't want to print 5MP photos over BT either.
I think there is room for both. It's if BT speeds up fast enough in time that we could be in for a fight. Otherwise I think they serve different enough markets that things will be OK.
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
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.
"(which very little people have)"
Why don't the very tall people don't have them? Or at least the some-what-average height?
OK, unless I'm totally stupid, lots more devices available support Bluetooth than support Wireless USB.
Will it be better supported tomorrow? Who knows. What I do know is that any time device interconnection standards become balkanized, computer users lose.
Why yes, I AM a rocket scientist!
In my opinion, Bluetooth has failed because it is trying to be a wireless USB. Got a USB keyboard or mouse? There's a Bluetooth wireless alternative. But that is not where Bluetooth excels.
The real power behind Bluetooth is the ability to participate in dynamic short range ad-hoc networks. Walk into a Starbucks and place/pay for an order via Bluetooth. Want to know where the heck you are? Query the nearest Bluetooth enabled milepost. Need to print a map? Send it to the nearest Bluetooth printing kiosk.
Of course you can't do any of these things today. Why not? Because everyone only sees it (Bluetooth) as a wireless USB! (What's dynamic or ad-hoc about a keyboard for kris-sake?).
So I say... bring on wireless USB, let it take its proper role and then maybe we can use Bluetooth they way it was intended.
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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