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What went wrong with wireless USB

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Re: What went wrong with wireless USB

#111

Post by grumbel »

seba_dos1 wrote: post #46
dist-epoch wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> which makes the value proposition a lot less clear. Wirelessly transferring files between a phone and a computer seems like a big use case. Still no easy standard way of doing it.

scp works well for me.

That requires having an account on the other machine. What's missing is anonymous scp, where the other side just opens up a directory, and you can copy into it. One can build something like this with rsyncd, but it's not a pretty shell one-liner to get it going and it still requires both devices to be on the same network.

Re: What went wrong with wireless USB

#112

Post by hnlmorg »

adrianN wrote: post #76
hnlmorg wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Back when Bluetooth was new, the alternative for wirelessly sharing data between mobile devices like phones was infrared. IR was exceptionally slow, required line-of-sight and even at the time, felt like a shitty solution. So even though the early implementations of Bluetooth also left a lot to be desired (battery hungry, insecure, and also slow), it was still a massive improvement on what came before. Wireless USB w…

I wonder why IR is slow. Shouldn’t there be plenty of bandwidth available at those frequencies?

It was harder to extract a clean signal due to ambient environmental conditions.

You could probably solve those issues with modern tech though. Things have advanced significantly since IR was popular. For example, back then Bluetooth was slow too.

Re: What went wrong with wireless USB

#113

Post by palata »

tossandthrow wrote: post #110
palata wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it would have been very cool and something actually useful. Less efficient, just for "cool". I think it's better to stick with cables.

Yep! 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.

Totally. 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.

Re: What went wrong with wireless USB

#114

Post by fragmede »

tgv wrote: post #98
dist-epoch wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> which makes the value proposition a lot less clear. Wirelessly transferring files between a phone and a computer seems like a big use case. Still no easy standard way of doing it.

Airdrop works. Ok, it's platform bound, but I'm sure it could be ported. It's not such a big thing, though. I hardly use it, and young people don't seem to use it either. The stuff on their phone and laptop seem separate worlds, just like mine are. Might be because they don't know about it, though.

Hell, copy and paste works between iphone and MacOS if you've got the same icloud logged into both. Airplay is too cumbersome has been supplanted by long hold -> copy; ctrl-v, and the reverse. Works for images as well.

Re: What went wrong with wireless USB

#115

Post by [deleted] »

miki123211 wrote: post #78
phire wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bluetooth 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…

> the wireless headset was the killer app in its early days Don't forget music piracy. At least over here, a lot of kids had phones that did Bluetooth, and the primary use case for it was sharing songs they liked with each other. You could use infrared (IRDA) for that, and some people did before Bluetooth was common, but it was much slower. This was mostly on low-end Nokias, maybe with a bit of Sony Ericsson thrown i…

[deleted]

Re: What went wrong with wireless USB

#116

Post by Findecanor »

hmry wrote: post #34
freehorse wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But HID had not been designed for the possibility that packets could get lost Doesn't the same problem exist for USB dongles with proprietary RF protocols? Logi Bolt is a good solution. But ime most other USB dongles are terrible. I have had a lot of bad connection issues with such USB dongles, and never with similar bluetooth devices. USB dongles also use the same 2.4GHz band, and even more they are prone to inter…

The proprietary protocol can use absolute positions between device/dongle, and then the dongle can translate to relative positions at the edge, by returning the difference since the last poll

Precisely. That is how I would have designed a wireless mouse protocol: using wrapping counters and sending the counter values. The HID protocol does not support an input value that is Absolute/Wrap (although it could be extended to do so, and I think that it should)

I'd think it would also be possible to get around congestion problems by using tricks such as multiple channels and/or interference detection on top of BLE. But only Logitech knows how Bolt actually works.

Re: What went wrong with wireless USB

#117

Post by [deleted] »

phire wrote: post #41
nurettin wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't see why Bluetooth took off and wusb didn't. It must have something to do with marketing.

Bluetooth 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…

[deleted]

Re: What went wrong with wireless USB

#118

Post by numpad0 »

londons_explore wrote: post #14

Imo, 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 net…

I personally don't think this comment would be so outrageously wrong. I for one thought about making a Wi-Fi headphone for couple times.

Re: What went wrong with wireless USB

#119

Post by ndriscoll »

miki123211 wrote: post #89
consp wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> and barely any hierarchy of (folders etc). One of my great hate pet peeves with all smartphone and cloud apps is the "abstraction" and reliance on search. For me folders is quicker and less error prone, and as a bonus it saves on unneeded bandwidth (to load previews) and computing costs. Also stop telling me I must use your one off "feature set" of sorting and ordering which either nobody uses or copies differently…

Folders as an abstraction don't really make sense beyond documents, though. If your music is stored in a folder hierarchy, and can, in principle, be located anywhere, how do you index it to provide a library view? How do you distinguish it from random audio files that just happen to be ID3 tagged, but which you don't want as part of your permanent music collection? How do you efficiently react to deletion events? Wha…

You index it with btrees just like everything else. You distinguish it by configuring which folders to watch. You react to events with inotify. You don't give your music app write permission to your library. It only needs to write its indexes and playlists. All of your other questions become irrelevant; you delete the files you mean to delete with your file manager. In practice, music is small and storage is cheap, so deleting seems like a weird use-case for an application dedicated to music. I still have files that have been migrating across computers for 25 years.

Re: What went wrong with wireless USB

#120

Post by greatgib »

nurettin wrote: post #15
variaga wrote: post #10

I 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 ca…

I don't see why Bluetooth took off and wusb didn't. It must have something to do with marketing.

In my opinion, for computers, wireless mouse (and eventually keyboards) was one of the killer app that showed pushed for Bluetooth to be common in computers and laptops. "Not needing a dongle" was a huge added value compared to the private radio protocol of manufacturers
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