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What went wrong with wireless USB

oldvcr.blogspot.com

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Re: What went wrong with wireless USB

#41

Post by phire »

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.

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 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.

Re: What went wrong with wireless USB

#42

Post by freehorse »

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

Is position estimation from the signal that accurate for that?

Re: What went wrong with wireless USB

#43

Post by dist-epoch »

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…

> 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.

Re: What went wrong with wireless USB

#44

Post by dtech »

dist-epoch wrote: post #43
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…

> 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.

Imo cloud storage like Dropbox has 95% solved this use case for years, which is why alternative solutions haven't popped up.

Re: What went wrong with wireless USB

#45

Post by dirkt »

dist-epoch wrote: post #43
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…

> 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.

But that doesn't need new peripherals, I could do that in my home WLAN network if they'd just install standard software for it on the phone (which you can fix by installing it from F-Droid etc.)

Re: What went wrong with wireless USB

#46

Post by seba_dos1 »

dist-epoch wrote: post #43
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…

> 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.

Re: What went wrong with wireless USB

#47

Post by mort96 »

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…

At this point, the decision to add Bluetooth or not is literally just a product decision. If you don't want Bluetooth in your product, you actively have to disable the Bluetooth part of your WiFi chip, because you can't really get a WiFi chip without Bluetooth.

Re: What went wrong with wireless USB

#48

Post by mort96 »

londons_explore wrote: post #25
explodes wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I 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.

The protocol should allow it, even if the implementation perhaps limits users to the local network or some other more sensible security policy.

If the protocol allows it, products using the protocol will require it.

Re: What went wrong with wireless USB

#49

Post by DonHopkins »

_Algernon_ wrote: post #27
dodslaser wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please do not give me more devices that need to connect to my WiFi for basic functionality. These devices add congestion, attack surface, and give manufacturers access to way more information than I am comfortable with. I already have to fight my washing machine, stove, refrigerator, etc. on this.

>Basically, IP networking still allows direct connections, but also allows far more possibilities.

Hey, is your root password still bazz1l?

I've got a cat named Emacs, but he's not allowed to be a root password.

Re: What went wrong with wireless USB

#50

Post by hnlmorg »

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.

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 wasn’t a significant enough improvement to Bluetooth given that BT was already ubiquitous by that point, but also cheap and (by that point) battery efficient now too.

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