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Wireless USB hubs
HaggiZ writes "Here is alternative to the clutter of USB cables and keys sitting on your desk. Now Belkin has announced their own wire-free USB setup. It's a wireless USB hub, allowing your to plug devices into the hub and have your PC/laptop elsewhere and not need to worry about running cables along the livingroom or study to reach. Very handy for laptop users, I can imagine some very handy uses for so HTPCs as well. Shipping in spring for a shave under $130."
Well, yeah, it sounds great and will probably be great for lots of things.
However, performance will drop on these items, even the fastest wireless gaming mouses have a semi-noticable lag when you use them. This lag in other items could create problems, like obfuscated code going to printers, etc.
Also, a security issue if you live in close-quarters (apartments, office buildings) because people could sniff the "packets" between the hub and device. They could watch you on your webcam, when you have your webcam software off.
Well, it will probably be good, the cons are not too bad, I will actually probably buy one myself.
Windows? I haven't used that since 1999. Fix the Slashdot Problems
I have a PVR, the Humax 9200T. It allows me to record etc from digital tv/radio.
I can transfer those recordings from it to a pc via a USB connection, unfortunately whenever I want to transfer those it means connecting my laptop upto it. Because of the PVR's location in a cabinet it is a bit of hassle.
With a wireless usb adapter it essentially means I can transfer those recordings to my laptop/desktop pc with the minimum of hassle.
Not everything uses or supports bluetooth.
Wireless USB is a lot faster, according to specs it has 480 Mbit/s, whereas Bluetooth is only 721 kbit/s.
Sigs are bad for your health
Ooh, Slashdot short memory! Don't forget we're not buying Belkin after the fiasco with their routers redirecting occasional DNS requests to the Belkin website to show an advert.
Happened a little over a year ago and Slashdot was up in arms about it!
THIS, is a great idea that I can guaruntee will make money.
Personally, i expect to see one of these im my home. There have always been USB hubs, then there have been the wireless adapters (labelled for printers and such), but never a wireless hub (to my knowledge). WE have a couple digital cameras, a scanner, an external hard drive, and a mouse hooked up through USB. All but the mouse go through a USB 2.0 hub. When we move the laptop, usually we just disconnect the hub. now, it will be possible to just... well... go. =D
Honesty may be the best policy, but by process of elimination, dishonesty is the second best policy.
I don't know how useful this will be to me. Its not the wire, one, running to the usb hub, but the wires, four, running from the hub to the devices. Now if I could just plug in a wireless dongle to each device that would be cool.
Supporting World Peace Through Nuclear Pacification
700k/s is good enough for anyone.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
All we need now is wireless power! Heh.
Since last 20 years I have been looking at all those fscking interfaces and 'Plug and Prey' and so on. (no offence intended). USB offers fast reliable and clean interface, that really brings the device up and running in minutes.
Now this addition of wireless hub will make me more than happy.
For those who don't get it, the point of the hub is to provide a place where you can plug in your scanner, printer, and other external peripherals, providing them all with wireless functionality, without the scanner and printer actually having the wireless capability built in. Makes sense for those of us with lots of USB peripherals who also have a wireless laptop.
What's a little odd is that they aren't using bluetooth, but the article claims its 100x faster than bluetooth. Perhaps this opens up the idea of plugging in hard drives into a USB hub like this, either for backup, for extra workspace, or just a great way to store your extensive mp3/movie/pr0n collection.
"All great wisdom is contained in .signature files"
Interesting that Belkin doesn't give an approximate range.
This might be more convenient than daisy-chaining USB hubs for that long run to the webcam in my bondage dungeon.
Because we figured out that stone is not the best wheel material.
rj
But like the grandparent post said, the real point is that most things aren't available in Bluetooth. You want to plug in your external hard drive by Bluetooth? You can't buy one that would let you do that. Is your digital camera designed to use Bluetooth to connect to your computer? Your drawing tablet? Your PDA? Your cell phone? Your printer? Your DVD-RW drive?
Some of these things may be available in Bluetooth, but if they were and if your computer supported Bluetooth you probably would be using it already. This is a solution for things that must be USB (or you don't want to fork out to buy the Bluetooth version), and I can see it being quite handy. It would be nice to have a little collection of USB stuff that I could plug into my laptop with one little adapter so I'm still cordless instead of the wire running over to the hub. And with a HTPC (as someone else mentioned) you could use this to plug USB stuff in by the couch where you are (game pads, memory sticks, etc) instead of having to reach behind your collection of AV equiptment where the PC is.
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
It looks very handy, but why should the PC need yet another wireless interface?
Surely with a clever enough driver, you could tunnel USB traffic over 802.11 (or even over TCP/IP). Make a USB hub that provides the server for this tunnelling client, and you'd wouldn't need a dongle.
RIAA: Hey. WTF is this, you got 30 gigs of pirated mp3s! You're so sued!
Gollegeboy: Dude I swear one asshole sits in front of the building and beams his iPod contents to everyone with wireless USB!
Sounds like Belkin is competing with this (and I assume other similar) product:
http://www.keyspan.com/products/usb/server/
Haven't used it, but I'm intrigued by the idea.
While what I'm going to say may seem slightly off-topic at first, keep reading, please. On my last trip into Seoul, I went looking in the computer malls for a DivX player for several hours. These are easy to find and play movies or music of most formats through your TV with 5.1 sound. While I could build one myself, these are smaller (about the size of a cable modem or wireless router) and/or cheaper (about US$125) than a home-built solution. Oddly, they all worked off of a USB cable. You disconnect the DivX player from the A/V setup, carry it over to your computer, load the movie that you want to watch onto the flash RAM, reattach the player to the A/V setup, and play the movie. This seemed rather like a lot of work.
So, I asked for what I thought was an obvious feature -- to access a Samba share across a wireless (or even physical) network to play movies. After hours of talking to virtually every vendor and them making many phone calls to their suppliers, I found no DivX players with this faeture. One shop promised that it would be in the "next model."
It would be pretty easy for me to set up Geexbox to do this, but I really wanted the small form-factor at the small price. I expected that a network-aware player would cost more, but never suspected that one did not exist. It's not really important enough for me to spend over US$200 on, and I certainly want a setup that's small enough to take back home with me when I'm finished in Korea, so I guess that I'll pass on building my own and wait for that "next model."
Put identity in the browser.
The problem with their implementation is that the USB dongle that comes with the hub will not enable you for future Wireless USB devices, i.e. all you get is a hub, and that's it. So if you buy one of these, you'll also have to buy another Wireless Host Controller or Host Wired Adapter a few months down the road to give you full wireless USB capabilities. I'm holding out for one of those, personally.
I have seen attempts to do this before and even bought one (albeit it was just point-to-point and designed specifically for printers). I would not buy it until some independent testing was done it (Tom's hardware style). Basically my HP printer would work for a week or two and then it would just return with communication error until I power cycled everything. I remember a movement to make an official WUSB (wireless USB) protocol, but it did not seem to go anywhere. If Belkin finally made a version that actually works on most hardware without glitches, hurray to them. It is a very difficult task because of the way USB works.
Take a look at the USB specs, and the number of vendors deploying them. USB devices are 'trusted' where BT devices are 'paired'. BT in its first incarnation had an operation radius of 8m. With WiFi, the operational radius, given Defcon successes, might be nearly 200km (line of sight, no sun spots, nearby Schwarzchild radius, etc). So far, 8m vs 200km. Speed in payload is about 52x, USB 2.0 vs BT 1.1 spec.
BT is really designed as a paired communications medium (with dedicated voice channel) as a PAN setup utilizing OBEX (object exchange) and a few other interesting inter-device tricks. USB is a perhipheral connector and virtualizing the electrical part through wireless is a godsend. USB is more layer 1 & 2, where BT is a full stack.
---- Teach Peace. It's Cheaper Than War.
Consider the Asus 500g Deluxe router. You can install Linux on it, in the form of openwrt(.org), or dd-wrt(google-it!); so long as your peripherals are all Linux peripherals. It has *2*, USB 2.0 ports in the back, and costs less, about 90 euros including tax. I imagine you can even daisy-chain extra USB peripherals using that old USB hub you discarded awhile ago. Besides USB ports, what's a (wireless!)dumb hub gonna do for you? Why not enjoy a full-on wireless Linux NAS file server/router/printer server/ ... and in the future web cam... (?)
You can't be ahead of the curve, if you're stuck in a loop.
This articleo th/index.php
http://www.macworld.com/news/2005/05/09/uwbblueto
Dicusses the use of Bluetooth as a mediator between the different UWB implementations.
Will the Belkin/Freescale units interoperate with future products using Intel Wimedia? Or is the proposal in the MacWorld article just what is needed for speedier and wireless USB connections?
Any info on the security implications of carrying your precious "data" around on a high-speed wireless usb key?
Other than that I'd be very pleased to diminish the rats nest of cables and be able to place things like scanners independent of the computers location.
# ~: no sigs today
Most laptop users don't want things sticking out of their computers. I think it would be great if they made a reciever that went in ExpressCard/34 and PCMCIA slots. That way, people could always leave it in. And eventually have laptop manufacturers build it in to their hardware.
I, for one (to use the standard /. form), wouldn't touch Belkin drivers if you paid me. This sounds like a good idea but in practise? You know there'll be big headaches.
spoonerize "magic trackpad"
And exactly how does security on this thing work? Can you drive by and connect to the USB hub? Now that's a good way to completely take over most machines.
If UWB is like 802.11x then the actual throughput will at best only be about half the claimed speed since the protocol will eat up the other half. Because wireless is half-duplex and has to use the much less efficient Carrier Sense Avoidence instead of Carrier Sense Detection to avoid collusions, your 54 mbps 802.11g router will give you maybe 30 megs tops under ideal conditions. And the more devices talking at the same time the slower it goes as they all try to contend for the medium like a bunch of truckers all trying to talk on the same CB channel at the same time. I'm guessing that a UWB wireless USB hub that claimed 480 mbps on the box when you bought it will actually run a lot slower in the real world. Sadly, vendors usually feel free to use the highest numbers available to them to market the products even if the customers will never achieve those numbers in actual use.
1. It doesn't exist yet. At the Belkin booth at CES they showed the plastics but nothing inside. Instead they took me over to these two huge boxes that were performing the USB function. When I laid my hands on the box I think I left no less than 3-layers of skin. (it's hot, really hot). This product is not going to be ready for prime-time in March.
2. It isn't interoperable with any other UWB technology that is going to be introduced in the market place during 2nd half of 06'. This product is using Freescales proprietary UWB chipset. WiMedia, the clear winner of the UWB standards issues has much more market traction and pull behind it. Companies like Intel, Microsoft, Samsung, Toshiba, and Dell are behind WiMedia. With these gorillas behind this solution its only a matter of time before Freescale and its DS technology go obsolete or they buy a WiMedia company. UWB is going to be a revolutionary point to point wireless technology, but it has to be done properly, with interoperability events and multiple chip vendors. Proprietary solutions in this day and age do not work for the end consumer because the consumer want to have a choice in what they are buying.
Take my advice and wait on a product that will truly meet market needs.
Regards,
UWB-Guru