8 ms·
What went wrong with wireless USB
- jauntywundrkind 1y agoThis was so cool to go over. It does seem to be missing a pretty significant era though? There's 802.11ad (2011) / 802.11ay (2021) / wigig. It's mainly known for video, and is used today for VR headsets. But there's a huge variety of 802.11ad docks out there that also have USB, mostly about a decade old now! Intel's tri-band 17265 (2015) was semi popular in the day as the supporting wifi+wigig+bt host adapter, works with many of these docks. https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/products/sku/86451/intel-triband-wirelessac-17265/specifications.html https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/products/sku/86451/i... I've definitely considered buying a dock & wigig mpcie card & test driving this all! Price was way out of reach for me at the time, and I expect the performance caveats (range, speed, latency) are significant, but it could potentially genuinely help me run less cables around the office & the patio, and that would be cool. Afaik though there's no Linux support though, so I haven't tried. Not UWB focused (but could work over IP capable UWB systems) I'd love to see more usb-ip systems emerge. It works pretty well for DIY (and kind of has for multiple decades now), but productization & standardization of flows feels hopeless, & worse, feels like anyone who knows up is likely to do the wrong thing & make something proprietary or with nasty hooks. https://usbip.sourceforge.net https://usbip.sourceforge.net And not USB specific, but pretty cool that the briefly mentioned 802.15.4 group continues to have some neat & ongoingly advancing 6-9GHz UWB work. IEEE 802.15.4ab is expected semi soon. Spark Microsystems for example recently announced an incredibly low power SR1120 transciever, good for up to 40mbps, capable of very low latency. It'd be lovely to see this used somehow for generic/universal peripheral interconnect. https://www.hackster.io/news/spark-microsystems-unveils-its-second-generation-uwb-transceiver-the-sr1120-643bfb642d30 https://www.hackster.io/news/spark-microsystems-unveils-its-...
- classichasclass 1y ago(author) Funny you should mention, because a couple other people also mentioned this to me after I posted it. Sadly, I don't have any of those devices here, but I added a footnote to the article about them.
- msla 1y agoGreat post, but it's a bit disorienting. As I said in another post here: > This is like a transmission from an alternate universe where the mice I used for decades didn't exist.
- Liftyee 1y agoInteresting to read about the (literal) bandwidth limitations on data rates. It's something I've been aware of but not fully understood for a long time. "Why can't you just turn the wave on and off faster", etc...
- bestham 1y agoInstead of talking about the fundamentals like Fourier transforms, Shannon/Nyquist and wave propagation i usually refer to human speech: how increasing the rate of speech (signalling rate) comes with 1) substantial reduction in transmitting distance as the environment affects signal quality and 2) places a higher burden on error correction (interpretation of language) that is independent of the actual ability for the transmitter to create the faster speech.
- kensai 1y agoThe standard of "wireless USB" was there, but probably as in any standards war, moved too slowly and had less to offer than competing standards. Are we not better off with Wifi and Bluetooth now? Btw, is there a direct comparison anywhere regarding energy consumption of the competing standards in real situations?
- gizmo686 1y agoNeither Wifi nor Bluetooth are a 1:1 replacement for wireless USB, in that neither allow you to use a standard USB device without a wired path between the device and host. In theory, Bluetooth ought to be the replacement for most use cases, and would simply require replacing your USB devices with Bluetooth devices. In practice, Bluetooth is still kind of terrible, so I'm tempted to say any alternative timeline where something else won the personal area network war would probably be better. We still kind of do wireless USB, in that the standard for wireless mouse and keyboards is still not Bluetooth, but a dedicated USB dongle that ships with the device. Such options are available for wireless headsets as well, although Bluetooth seems to winning in that niche.
- kensai 1y agoIt used to be the case that BT was terrible, but in the last few years I have increasingly stable device connections. Could it be they simply ironed out the bugs over the years, the standard matured, and also the manufacturers are more compliant? It just works for me, no horror stories. And BT LE is indeed low energy. Btw, do you have any other suspected reason (politics aside) that wireless USB did not catch on?
- usrusr 1y agoThe real change is that BT LE isn't just about low energy. That might have actually been the original intention, but in practice it is so good beyond that core area of competence that it has also displaced classic Bluetooth in fields like audio streaming, connections beyond strictly PAN distance and so on. And it will only get better as more remnants of Old Bluetooth are disappearing from devices, that have been retained for backwards compatibility.
- begueradj 1y agoImpressive. It sounds to be a thorough summary of Wirth's work.
- variaga 1y agoI worked on the design of wireless USB chips around 2008 - 2010. They worked - you really could get USB 2.0 full rate connections wirelessly and we had some neat demos. I would say the major problem it had with adoption was that wired USB also provided power. (A lot more people use usb to charge their phone than to sync their phone.) So great - wireless connectivity... but you still have to plug the device into a cable at some point (or have replaceable batteries), which makes the value proposition a lot less clear. Beyond that it suffered from the usual adoption chicken-and-egg problem. Laptop manufacturers didn't want to add it because it was an expense that didn't drive sales since there weren't any must-have peripherals that used it, and peripheral manufacturers didn't want to make wireless usb devices since they couldn't be used with a standard laptop (at least not without a WUSB dongle - which raised the cost). Still, very fun stuff to work on.
- nurettin 1y agoI don't see why Bluetooth took off and wusb didn't. It must have something to do with marketing.
- shahzaibmushtaq 1y agoyes-and-no. In my opinion, this was the timing and usefulness of Bluetooth in an era when only Nokia ruled the world. Moreover, there are many other reasons too.
- designerarvid 1y agoLargest phone manufacturers of the time (Ericsson and Nokia) supporting and developing it surely helped.
- msh 1y agoBluetooth took off before wireless usb did and was allready useful to people when wusb came a long. It was also lower power so you could do peripherals that was smaller and longer lived.
- phire 1y agoBluetooth had some early success in cellphones, mostly to support Bluetooth headsets and car radio integration, starting from about 1999. It could do other things, but the wireless headset was the killer app in its early days. Bluetooth didn’t really hit mainstream until the arrival of chipsets that multiplexed Bluetooth and WiFi on the same radio+antenna. My memory is that happened sometime around 2007-2010. At that point, the BOM cost to add Bluetooth to a laptop or smart device became essentially zero, why not include it? Modern smartphones with both Bluetooth and Wifi arrived at around the same time (I suspect these combo chipsets were originally developed for handheld devices, and laptops benefited) And once Bluetooth was mainstream, we saw a steady rise in devices using Bluetooth. WUSB operates on a completely different set of frequencies and technology and couldn’t share hardware with WiFi. Maybe it could have taken off if there was a killer app, but there never was.
- lofaszvanitt 1y agoIn the coming age of AI we can do our own communications protocols and leave behind the horrible bt and wifi implementations. Right? :D
- londons_explore 1y agoImo, at this point nobody should be designing any wireless protocol that doesn't support full IP networking. Sure, your Bluetooth headphones only 1:1 connect to your phone... But if they could connect directly to your WiFi router they could keep playing music when your phone goes out of range... Or you could connect them to two phones... Or you could connect them to your TV to get sound from that... Basically, IP networking still allows direct connections, but also allows far more possibilities. Same with wireless USB - a wireless USB printer can only print from one host - but a wireless IP printer can be on the network for all to use.
- explodes 1y agoI don't want to have to expose any of my devices to the entire internet just to use them. Sure one can firewall and block things manually, but I would prefer things were secure by default.
- londons_explore 1y agoThe protocol should allow it, even if the implementation perhaps limits users to the local network or some other more sensible security policy.
- tossandthrow 1y agoThis directly opposes design principles of secure and correct by construction. If any of my colleagues would make an overly abstracted solution for a problem and ship it with a dsl to configure it, I would say no, and ask them to solve the problem at hand.
- mort96 1y agoIf the protocol allows it, products using the protocol will require it.
- 8n4vidtmkvmk 1y agoThe implementation needs to be controllable and simple enough for basic users then. If something is possible, companies will abuse it.
- shahzaibmushtaq 1y agoIn certain cases, plug-and-play interfaces outperform wireless mediums.
- brudgers 1y agoMaybe the deeper problem with wireless USB was that “Wireless USB” is an appealing word salad rather than a solution a meaningful problem. I mean a wireless USB hub would eliminate exactly one cable [1] and onboard wireless USB requires the same number of radios as WiFi. [2] But “Wireless USB” still sounds a kinda’ sexy answer to “What are you working on?” [3] [1] Wirelessly eliminating one USB cable already had its critical solution in a mature dongle dependent wireless mouse market. [2] For example WiFi printers were already a thing and fit into the evergreen problem of sharing printers and wireless USB wasn’t going to improve online experience. [3] “Wireless USB” is a great sound bite. Short, sounds like the future, and people will feel like they know what it means. [4] [4] The article reminded me that indeed at some point in the last five years (or maybe ten, these things run together) I thought “wireless USB would do that” and googling “wireless usb” because surely it must exist but of course it didn’t really and I probably bought a long cable off eBay. But I remember coming up with the thought and googling.
- jajko 1y agoThat's one thing, but what happened to wireless HDMI? That would save a lot of cable pain in literally all households out there too.
- izacus 1y agoIt exists if you pay for a pair of dongles and are ok with bandwidth compormises.
- usrusr 1y agoAnd replace cable pain with ISM congestion pain? Living in a somewhat densely populated area I find myself switch off Wi-Fi on my smartphone because paid LTE is so much more reliable quite often.
- jonesjohnson 1y agoSlightly off-topic, but I'm totally in favor of letting HDMI die the slow and agonizing death it's supposed to die. https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/02/hdmi-forum-to-amd-no-you-cant-make-an-open-source-hdmi-2-1-driver/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/02/hdmi-forum-to-amd-no...
- mystified5016 1y agoBecause once you have more than a handful running at once (say an apartment building) the interference causes them all to fail
- michelb 1y agoDidn't help you had to flip the signal up-down-up to get it working.
- RantyDave 1y agoAwesome. Now do WiMax.
- ElFitz 1y agoWe were a bit late when we discovered wireless USB had been a thing. Still, we managed to find one pair of emitter and receiver that also transmitted HDMI, power the "receiver" side with a battery, in a backpack, and hook it up with another power bank to an Oculus DK1. Unexpectedly, battery time was never an issue. The WUSB chip in the receiver would overheat long before that and start throttling, leading to jittery head tracking. Turned out, it was a widespread issue with that WUSB chip.
- myself248 1y agoSeems like you could spend a smidgen of that battery power on a fan, no?
- brudgers 1y ago[I am not a physicist] Wouldn’t a fan in a backpack just move hot air including the heat of its motor?
- owenversteeg 1y agoYes, it will move the hot air, but typically the temperature of the chip is substantially higher than the ambient air inside the enclosure (be it a backpack or a laptop shell or anything else.) Furthermore, even if the backpack is 100% sealed, by raising its temperature you significantly increase the amount of heat that the backpack rejects. A quick Google says that the Oculus DK1 used ~3W, and you can easily find a fan that uses a fraction of a watt to move a reasonable amount of air, so this would probably have worked out.
- brudgers 1y agoFans reduce sensible heat because humans have evaporative cooling. A backpack is pretty much a closed system and chips use convective cooling. Adding a fan won’t create a positivee pressure gradient between the backpack and outside world but will add 3 or more watts of heat to the closed system.
- ajross 1y agoInterestingly one of the competing chipsets for Wireless USB lives on today... in the market-leading[1] Spektrum radios for RC vehicle control. Their DSMx protocol is based on the Cypress Semiconductor products, which are still available in the market despite not being recommended for new designs. [1] But certainly not best. Consensus for "best" goes to the open source ExpressLRS work based on the Semtech LoRa products.
- znpy 1y agoThis post has unlocked the memory of seeing some Intel CEO demoing wireless power and connectivity for laptops. Basically you "just" put your laptop on your desk and it automatically starts getting power (similar to what phones can do nowadays) as well transmit video to a display (on the same desk). It's sad that went nowhere, it would have been very cool and something actually useful.
- palata 1y ago> it would have been very cool and something actually useful. Less efficient, just for "cool". I think it's better to stick with cables.
- tossandthrow 1y agoYep! It would be a marginal. Improvement at a huge increase in complexity Adjacent intention on the same action that leads to a connected computer, eg. I put my laptop on my friend table for storage, and it connects against my intention.
- palata 1y agoTotally. Many accessories nowadays require bluetooth/wifi where actually they could be connected with a cable: they don't move and they need to be charged. Connecting over a cable is trivial: you detect the connection and that's it, and the user physically sees the connection between the devices. Connecting over radio requires pairing, that is very frustrating when it doesn't work. Pairing is annoying so devices try to automatically reconnect, but then if you pair with multiple devices, it brings frustration because it never automatically connects to what the user wants. Whenever cables are a possible solution, they are superior.
- znpy 1y ago> Connecting over radio requires pairing, that is very frustrating when it doesn't work. Everything's frustrating when it doesn't work. > Connecting over radio requires pairing This is a solved problem, plagued by technology fragmentation. You could very well save the necessary information for discovery and pairing onto an NFC tag and use that to access the network (further authentication might happen, if configured). This is basically never done on WiFi because you cannot assume a client host has a NFC reader (let alone proper code handling the tag and the information). But it's done in the world of bluetooth: some big-name headsets (Sony IIRC) can do bluetooth connection negotiation via NFC. You activate the feature (dedicated button), tap your phone and off you go. No pin, no pairing annoyances.
- m000 1y agoCould wireless USB be a case of "if all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail"? [1] I.e. the effort was driven by the USB-IF [2] that happens to be more hardware than software oriented. So they were eager to deliver a solution based around a new chipset that could be adopted immediately by anyone interested. This failed to account for adoption friction/lag, and the era of ARM-based SBCs and WiFi proliferation which was already dawning (e.g. iPAQ handhelds were available at the time [3]). So, they ended up with most of their envisioned use-cases [4] being covered either by SBCs, or by Bluetooth. At least in retrospect, standarizing a pure software solution like USB over IP, as an added-value proposition for the USB standard, would have made more sense. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_the_instrument#Abraham_Maslow https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_the_instrument#Abraham_... [2] https://www.usb.org/about https://www.usb.org/about [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPAQ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPAQ [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wireless_USB#Uses https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wireless_USB#Uses
- kasabali 1y agoI have a similar pet peeve with Miracast, though sources say over ethernet support was added to later Windows versions.
- Biganon 1y agoTo the aithor : careful, on one picture at least you blacked out the human-readable PIN of a device, but forgot to black out the corresponding barcode right below
- skinner927 1y agoThat’s the MAC address barcode
- Biganon 1y ago...the MAC address barcode was below the MAC address, the PIN barcode was below the PIN. They fixed it now.
- Marsymars 1y agoInterestingly, the 2017 Essential Phone used wireless USB for the data communication to its magnetically-attached/powered modular accessories. (Of which the only released one was a 360° camera.)
- meanmrmustard92 1y ago"depending on executive and blood alcohol level" is such a good throwaway joke
- tomhowls 1y ago[flagged]
- msla 1y agoThis is like a transmission from an alternate universe where the mice I used for decades didn't exist.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- labrador 1y agoWireless USB died before it could fulfill its destiny: hydrophone → RF → USB
- volkanvardar 1y agoI bought wirelessharddisk.com hoping it would be a thing.