Wireless Charging Standards Groups Agree To Merge

jfruh writes: The world where our gadgets all charge wirelessly has been delayed by several factors, one of which is that there are three industry groups promoting rival technological standards. That problem is now a little closer to a solution, as the Alliance for Wireless Power and the Power Matters Alliance announced a plan to merge.

Comments

With apologies

[nitehawk214]

They have agreed to merge their two organizations by mid-2015 and set up an as yet unnamed organization to “accelerate the availability and deployment of wireless charging technology on a global scale,” according to a statement Monday.

Well you know what that means.

Doesn't include Qi

[Anonymous Coward]

Except the catch is that it doesn't include the Wireless Power Consortium who makes Qi. Without Qi you still pretty much have two standards, it just seems that the the rest of the industry has banded together to fight the one standard that has actually been shipping on devices.

Although now that qualcomm quick charge 2.0 is shipping in devices I will no longer care about wireless charging until it is much faster.

Re:How does it help?

[TWX]

I suspect in the end, like Ethernet, Token Ring, DECnet, and other IEEE 802 network standards, one will win-out over the others. And like IEEE 802, it'll take close to 30 years for that one that becomes dominant to win-out, and it'll have some ridiculous limitations (like Ethernet's 100m physical limit and Ethernet's relatively small frame size) that plague its use for all time.

Re:How does it help?

[hawguy]

I suspect in the end, like Ethernet, Token Ring, DECnet, and other IEEE 802 network standards, one will win-out over the others. And like IEEE 802, it'll take close to 30 years for that one that becomes dominant to win-out, and it'll have some ridiculous limitations (like Ethernet's 100m physical limit and Ethernet's relatively small frame size) that plague its use for all time.

100m is hardly a ridiculous limitation, it's a tradeoff among speed, cost of media and transceivers and distance. Granted, it can be a problem in some circumstances, but the limit had to be set to *something*.

If you want to pay more for media and transceivers to get more distance you can use fiber. Or if you willing to trade speed for distance, you can get VDSL repeaters and extend the range to over a kilometer and you can use existing CAT-5 (or even CAT-3) wiring.

All of my network equipment supports 9000+ byte frames, how big would a frame need to be to stop being ridiculous? With TCP offloading, Jumbo frames don't make a huge difference in throughput.

Great news for early adopters

[DrXym]

It means that regardless of which alliance you got behind your tech is now obsolete.

Re:How does it help?

[AmiMoJo]

Qi has already won. Almost all wirelessly charged devices use the Qi standard, especially phones. Qi has the advantage of not requiring any data transfer, so the "free" chargers in coffee shops don't get to spy on you. Receivers can be extremely simple and retro-fitted to almost anything that uses USB for charging.

The other guys have lost, this is just their way of buying in to the winning standard while maintaining their contracts with people like Starbucks. What worries me is that those contracts may require future standards to log unique IDs as the competing wireless charging systems already do. No thanks.