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What went wrong with wireless USB

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Re: What went wrong with wireless USB

#91

Post by gnatolf »

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?

Mostly just SNR issues.

Re: What went wrong with wireless USB

#92

Post by usrusr »

jajko wrote: post #54

That's one thing, but what happened to wireless HDMI? That would save a lot of cable pain in literally all households out there too.

And 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.

Re: What went wrong with wireless USB

#93

Post by thaumasiotes »

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…

> the wireless headset was the killer app [for Bluetooth] in its early days

But the wireless headset is now a horrifying millstone making Bluetooth look like the world's stupidest trash fire. If you enable your microphone, you lose all audio from anything that doesn't want to use the microphone as the headset switches into "headset" mode and drops anything that wants to use "headphones" mode. There is no reason for there to even be two different modes.

Why is this still happening?

Re: What went wrong with wireless USB

#94

Post by akvadrako »

Findecanor wrote: post #17
numpad0 wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bluetooth isn't too bad, Logitech Bolt is based on BLE and it's just fine. Bigger problem is integration into x86/x86_64 platform.

Bluetooth mice use the HID protocol borrowed from USB, except with Bluetooth as carrier. But HID had not been designed for the possibility that packets could get lost: it sends movements as a relative vector since the previous packet. I don't know how Logi Bolt works, but Logitech has claimed that it should work better than BLE when the 2.4 GHz band is congested. Also that it would have better security than BLE.

Bolt can't be better than BLE because it is BLE. Same with Apple gear which pairs so seemlessly.

It's just that they control both sides of the signal so can better optimize the connection.

Re: What went wrong with wireless USB

#95

Post by gruturo »

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?

I'm frankly baffled at all these reports of IR being unreliable and slow. It... wasn't. Not for the file sizes of the day. I exchanged plenty of files back in the day, even at 115200bps a picture would be 2-3 seconds tops (pictures were small!). And when devices started supporting 4Mbps, even a large-ish MP3 would go in 5-6 seconds. All without setup or pairing, beautiful. Huge files (like full resolution pictures from an SLR camera) would take a while - but frankly they took almost the same time with a cable! You'd just have to plug their memory card directly into your computer if you were in a hurry.

The only really clunky use case for me was internet access - keeping phone and laptop positioned and aligned for 30 minutes was limiting.

And yes there IS plenty of bandwidth at those frequencies. In fact latest IR standards reach 1Gbps, but it's pretty much extinct. There was an attempt called Li-Fi to use it for as a wireless networking but I don't think it went far.

What I really miss is OBEX (Object Exchange), which worked also over Bluetooth, and which Apple sadly chose not to implement: simplest protocol to just ship a file or a contact vCard over, no setup, just worked - and it's been a standard for 20+ years. Early Android had it too, it was since dropped I think. Sigh.

Re: What went wrong with wireless USB

#96

Post by palata »

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…

> Don't forget music piracy.

What you describe is file sharing, not necessarily piracy :-). Just nitpicking, I understand what you mean of course!

Re: What went wrong with wireless USB

#97

Post by rikafurude21 »

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…

Wow this unlocked a bunch of memories from middle school where we would send each other the latest songs and games via bluetooth. I remember pirating games for my sony ericsson and sharing them with my friends and we would play these games in class. You could just share and install the .jar files. Good times

Re: What went wrong with wireless USB

#98

Post by tgv »

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.

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.

Re: What went wrong with wireless USB

#99

Post by znpy »

This 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.

Re: What went wrong with wireless USB

#100

Post by palata »

kmarc wrote: post #56
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.

I assume this is the same "problem". Most people (not the HN cohort) don't want to transfer "files", the abstraction of the file is either outdated for them or maybe even unnatural / unknown (younger generation). They might want to transfer (a better word: share) photos/videos, documents, etc. And for those they use specific apps and "the cloud". No "files" (for the sake of files), and barely any hierarchy of (folder…

I think I disagree with that. This "people don't want files, they want to share photos", to me, is what product people want to believe. The whole thing has been enforced on users and is self-reinforcing: of course if you don't show files to users, they will not know what a file is.

Sure, I may be in a photo gallery and I may want to share a few photos with a friend who may want those photos to be treated as photos (instead of going into a big "Downloads/" folder). But it doesn't mean, at all, that the concept of file has to disappear to the user. In fact the files still very much do exist on the system. Product people just assume users are stupid, IMHO.

And the thing is: this abstraction (not knowing what a file is) doesn't make it faster or more efficient. It just makes the user more dependent on their platform and apps. Look at backups: product people at Google/Apple will tell you "people don't want to backup their files, they want to pay us to make sure that they never lose an image". Conveniently, it means that people are 1) forced to pay them and 2) don't have control over their own files.

Maybe GenZ/alpha now are stuck with these abstractions because they never learned what a file was (for no reason other than being abused by product decisions), but older generations grew up with physical media. "I have a piece of paper, I have a book, I have a CD-ROM, and those are all different kinds of files that can go into different "boxes" that are called folders".

Files and folders are very natural. The reason people don't know about them is because we hide them and force them to pay for literally subpar experience.

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