8 ms·

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 ne

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 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 ago
I don't see why Bluetooth took off and wusb didn't. It must have something to do with marketing.
- shahzaibmushtaq 1y ago
  yes-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 ago
  Largest phone manufacturers of the time (Ericsson and Nokia) supporting and developing it surely helped.
- msh 1y ago
  Bluetooth 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 ago
  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.
  - mort96 1y ago
    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.
    - brookst 1y ago
      All of the BT+wifi chips I’ve worked with require active initialization of each feature; you have to signal the chip (over i2c or SPI or whatever) with what kind of BT operations you want. No BT stack in your product, no BT radio initialization, no BT/wifi multiplexing. At least in the (admittedly limited) chips I’ve worked with.
  - miki123211 1y ago
    > 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 into the mix. They definitely did not have WiFi, in fact, Nokia even tried to limit internet over Bluetooth for usual carrier monopoly reasons as far as I'm aware, but Bluetooth was definitely there. For many here, the iPhone not doing file and ringtone sharing over Bluetooth was one of its main limitations, at least early on. It was a social network in its own way, and having a device that couldn't participate in it was no fun.
- hnlmorg 1y ago
  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.
  - m4rtink 1y ago
    IR with palm devices was super nice - just point to the other device and send, then confirm on the other. No persistent pairing bullshit & you could also use it to control TVs.
    - hnlmorg 1y ago
      That’s how BT originally worked too but it got abused (I touched on this in my original comment when I said BT was insecure). The paring is a security measure to protect people from abuse. Back when BT was new, I used to get all sorts of random shit pushed onto my phone every Friday night on the drunk train home from London.
      - miki123211 1y ago
        I guess that was a lot less of a problem with IRDA as it required line-of-sight, which limited the abuse potential significantly. Some devices would even establish an IRDA connection automatically as soon as they found anything. I have friends whose laptop names have suddenly appeared on lecture room projectors, as their laptop's IRDA receiver was in direct line of sight of that of the teacher's. Not that you couldn't do that with Bluetooth, some early BT chipsets gave you a "<device name> wants to connect to you" dialog box any time somebody tried sending something to your device. This could be abused, to great student amusement, to display funny messages on that same projector if the lecturer's laptop had such a chipset.
  - 1y ago
- torginus 1y ago
  Introducing a new wireless protocol is incredibly difficult. You basically have to have all the countries in the world to give you a chunk of their spectrum. You have 2 mainstream protocols now, one for low energy, slow data transfers (Bluetooth) and one for fast, but more power hungry devices. I don't see the usecase for UWB.
  - BenjiWiebe 1y ago
    And as far as I know, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth didn't have frequency given to them. They instead used frequencies that were already available for unlicensed use.
- greatgib 1y ago
  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
- GuB-42 1y ago
  My guess is just that Bluetooth and Wi-Fi came first, and when wireless USB entered the party, there wasn't a real need for it, as most of its use cases were already covered by Bluetooth and Wi-Fi. It maybe could have worked with better marketing, but convincing potential customers to change something that works (somewhat, BT wasn't without issues) is hard. That's why we are keeping abominations like cigarette lighter sockets in cars even though they often can't even light cigarettes anymore. It is already well established and it works well enough as a power outlet.
- adrr 1y ago
  Bluetooth took off because it was easiest path to do wireless headsets when handsfree driving laws passed.
- rajnathani 1y ago
  Maybe the low-power feature of Bluetooth helped it, such as with the Bluetooth LE (Low Energy) spec that with the way "services" and "characteristics" are defined that it allows for extremely low power consumption when no read-operation is done and thus the Bluetooth radio power can be minimized. Also, the 2.4 GHz band of Bluetooth is inherently less power consuming than the higher frequency band of Wireless USB. But I guess the other problems may have been due to as the OP article brings up about it being in a different frequency communication band. Bluetooth on the other hand shares the same frequency band as Wi-Fi (2.4 GHz (which is also the OG Wi-Fi frequency band)). Thus for PC and mobile device OEMs, it is one less antenna to integrate. Furthermore, the higher frequency of the band would have made through-walls and further-distance communication less reliable. In this context, one of the few cool applications of wireless USB would've been a wireless keyboard or mouse (but this is coming from someone who is working on an OEM computer keyboard and mouse).
dist-epoch 1y ago
> 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.
- dtech 1y ago
  Imo cloud storage like Dropbox has 95% solved this use case for years, which is why alternative solutions haven't popped up.
  - beezlewax 1y ago
    Needing to upload files to third party servers just to get them onto your personal computer doesn't solve the case. It just injects a middleman.
    - mycatisblack 1y ago
      And only works when you’re connected to the internet.
    - ahoef 1y ago
      How does it not solve the problem? The data shows up on the other end. The fact that you don't agree with the implementation is a different thing, but it does solve the case.
      - otabdeveloper4 1y ago
        > How does it not solve the problem? It "solves" it but in a way that's ten times slower and fundamentally unreliable.
      - dist-epoch 1y ago
        For small files maybe. As shocking as it may seem, most Dropbox users just have the free version, with very limited space. Same for Google Drive or One Drive.
  - 1y ago
xandrius 1y ago
But today we can have wireless charge too, would that change things?
- moritonal 1y ago
  USB over QI wireless would be great.
- variaga 1y ago
  I think it could. If wireless charging docks has been common at the time, the upgrade to "now your wireless charger can do data sync too" is a straightforward improvement. Unfortunately, at the time there was only one phone that had wireless charging built in (Palm Pre). I know our sales and marketing did try to engage with them on getting wireless usb into "the next version" of the Pre, but nothing came of it. I don't know the details. At this point wifi is ubiquitous enough that a new version of wireless usb would have a hard time competing with it though.
simoncion 1y ago
> They worked - you really could get USB 2.0 full rate connections wirelessly and we had some neat demos. TFA mentions that contemporary users of these things didn't get anywhere near Hi-Speed USB speeds. The author's present-day testing agrees with these reports, finding that at least one device's maximum performance was just barely better than USB FullSpeed. If you were seeing 480Mbit performance with the hardware you were doing demos with, what went wrong between the demo table and the finished product?
- variaga 1y ago
  The product in the article I think it said came from 2006? Not based on the chips I worked on, anyway. Just like early wifi, there were several companies working on wireless usb chips at the time, and performance could vary a lot depending on who's product you bought, and when. Here's an article about us I found from 2008. https://www.eetimes.com/staccato-communications-ultra-wideband-ic-suits-high-volume-applications/ https://www.eetimes.com/staccato-communications-ultra-wideba... The "ripcord 2" chips (mentioned) definitely could do 480Mbps at short range. I worked on the design of the next generation after that (equal performance, but lower-cost/lower-power-consumption), which never made it to the commercial market. "What happened" was the combination of the product/ market mismatch I mentioned above (like, the wireless laptop dock was cool for a demo, but it didn't charge your laptop battery like a regular wired dock would, so it wasn't actually practical for daily use) so we didn't have enough revenue to self- sustain, and the "great recession" meant investment dried up and we eventually just ran out of money. Staccato merged with a different wireless usb startup to try to delay the inevitable, and then tried to "pivot" to something profoundly stupid and I bailed at that point. (They did an internal demo of the new "product". It was maybe the worst tech demo I've ever seen. I was out 2 weeks later. I think the company dragged on for maybe another year.)
  - simoncion 1y ago
    Ah. Nothing went wrong between the demo table and the finished product; the author is working with Mk. 1 products. Thanks much for the additional detailed background information. Sorry to hear about the slow demise of your former employer.
thangalin 1y ago
> but you still have to plug the device into a cable at some point That may explain why I can't find a 5 Gbps wireless USB extender for my work web cam. https://hardwarerecs.stackexchange.com/questions/18983/wireless-usb-extender https://hardwarerecs.stackexchange.com/questions/18983/wirel...

nurettin 1y ago

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

shahzaibmushtaq 1y ago
yes-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 ago
Largest phone manufacturers of the time (Ericsson and Nokia) supporting and developing it surely helped.
msh 1y ago
Bluetooth 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 ago
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.
- mort96 1y ago
  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.
  - brookst 1y ago
    All of the BT+wifi chips I’ve worked with require active initialization of each feature; you have to signal the chip (over i2c or SPI or whatever) with what kind of BT operations you want. No BT stack in your product, no BT radio initialization, no BT/wifi multiplexing. At least in the (admittedly limited) chips I’ve worked with.
- miki123211 1y ago
  > 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 into the mix. They definitely did not have WiFi, in fact, Nokia even tried to limit internet over Bluetooth for usual carrier monopoly reasons as far as I'm aware, but Bluetooth was definitely there. For many here, the iPhone not doing file and ringtone sharing over Bluetooth was one of its main limitations, at least early on. It was a social network in its own way, and having a device that couldn't participate in it was no fun.
hnlmorg 1y ago
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.
- m4rtink 1y ago
  IR with palm devices was super nice - just point to the other device and send, then confirm on the other. No persistent pairing bullshit & you could also use it to control TVs.
  - hnlmorg 1y ago
    That’s how BT originally worked too but it got abused (I touched on this in my original comment when I said BT was insecure). The paring is a security measure to protect people from abuse. Back when BT was new, I used to get all sorts of random shit pushed onto my phone every Friday night on the drunk train home from London.
    - miki123211 1y ago
      I guess that was a lot less of a problem with IRDA as it required line-of-sight, which limited the abuse potential significantly. Some devices would even establish an IRDA connection automatically as soon as they found anything. I have friends whose laptop names have suddenly appeared on lecture room projectors, as their laptop's IRDA receiver was in direct line of sight of that of the teacher's. Not that you couldn't do that with Bluetooth, some early BT chipsets gave you a "<device name> wants to connect to you" dialog box any time somebody tried sending something to your device. This could be abused, to great student amusement, to display funny messages on that same projector if the lecturer's laptop had such a chipset.
- 1y ago
torginus 1y ago
Introducing a new wireless protocol is incredibly difficult. You basically have to have all the countries in the world to give you a chunk of their spectrum. You have 2 mainstream protocols now, one for low energy, slow data transfers (Bluetooth) and one for fast, but more power hungry devices. I don't see the usecase for UWB.
- BenjiWiebe 1y ago
  And as far as I know, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth didn't have frequency given to them. They instead used frequencies that were already available for unlicensed use.
greatgib 1y ago
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
GuB-42 1y ago
My guess is just that Bluetooth and Wi-Fi came first, and when wireless USB entered the party, there wasn't a real need for it, as most of its use cases were already covered by Bluetooth and Wi-Fi. It maybe could have worked with better marketing, but convincing potential customers to change something that works (somewhat, BT wasn't without issues) is hard. That's why we are keeping abominations like cigarette lighter sockets in cars even though they often can't even light cigarettes anymore. It is already well established and it works well enough as a power outlet.
adrr 1y ago
Bluetooth took off because it was easiest path to do wireless headsets when handsfree driving laws passed.
rajnathani 1y ago
Maybe the low-power feature of Bluetooth helped it, such as with the Bluetooth LE (Low Energy) spec that with the way "services" and "characteristics" are defined that it allows for extremely low power consumption when no read-operation is done and thus the Bluetooth radio power can be minimized. Also, the 2.4 GHz band of Bluetooth is inherently less power consuming than the higher frequency band of Wireless USB. But I guess the other problems may have been due to as the OP article brings up about it being in a different frequency communication band. Bluetooth on the other hand shares the same frequency band as Wi-Fi (2.4 GHz (which is also the OG Wi-Fi frequency band)). Thus for PC and mobile device OEMs, it is one less antenna to integrate. Furthermore, the higher frequency of the band would have made through-walls and further-distance communication less reliable. In this context, one of the few cool applications of wireless USB would've been a wireless keyboard or mouse (but this is coming from someone who is working on an OEM computer keyboard and mouse).

dist-epoch 1y ago

> 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.

dtech 1y ago
Imo cloud storage like Dropbox has 95% solved this use case for years, which is why alternative solutions haven't popped up.
- beezlewax 1y ago
  Needing to upload files to third party servers just to get them onto your personal computer doesn't solve the case. It just injects a middleman.
  - mycatisblack 1y ago
    And only works when you’re connected to the internet.
  - ahoef 1y ago
    How does it not solve the problem? The data shows up on the other end. The fact that you don't agree with the implementation is a different thing, but it does solve the case.
    - otabdeveloper4 1y ago
      > How does it not solve the problem? It "solves" it but in a way that's ten times slower and fundamentally unreliable.
    - dist-epoch 1y ago
      For small files maybe. As shocking as it may seem, most Dropbox users just have the free version, with very limited space. Same for Google Drive or One Drive.
- 1y ago

xandrius 1y ago

But today we can have wireless charge too, would that change things?

moritonal 1y ago
USB over QI wireless would be great.
variaga 1y ago
I think it could. If wireless charging docks has been common at the time, the upgrade to "now your wireless charger can do data sync too" is a straightforward improvement. Unfortunately, at the time there was only one phone that had wireless charging built in (Palm Pre). I know our sales and marketing did try to engage with them on getting wireless usb into "the next version" of the Pre, but nothing came of it. I don't know the details. At this point wifi is ubiquitous enough that a new version of wireless usb would have a hard time competing with it though.

simoncion 1y ago

> They worked - you really could get USB 2.0 full rate connections wirelessly and we had some neat demos. TFA mentions that contemporary users of these things didn't get anywhere near Hi-Speed USB speeds. The author's present-day testing agrees with these reports, finding that at least one device's maximum performance was just barely better than USB FullSpeed. If you were seeing 480Mbit performance with the hardware you were doing demos with, what went wrong between the demo table and the finished product?

variaga 1y ago
The product in the article I think it said came from 2006? Not based on the chips I worked on, anyway. Just like early wifi, there were several companies working on wireless usb chips at the time, and performance could vary a lot depending on who's product you bought, and when. Here's an article about us I found from 2008. https://www.eetimes.com/staccato-communications-ultra-wideband-ic-suits-high-volume-applications/ https://www.eetimes.com/staccato-communications-ultra-wideba... The "ripcord 2" chips (mentioned) definitely could do 480Mbps at short range. I worked on the design of the next generation after that (equal performance, but lower-cost/lower-power-consumption), which never made it to the commercial market. "What happened" was the combination of the product/ market mismatch I mentioned above (like, the wireless laptop dock was cool for a demo, but it didn't charge your laptop battery like a regular wired dock would, so it wasn't actually practical for daily use) so we didn't have enough revenue to self- sustain, and the "great recession" meant investment dried up and we eventually just ran out of money. Staccato merged with a different wireless usb startup to try to delay the inevitable, and then tried to "pivot" to something profoundly stupid and I bailed at that point. (They did an internal demo of the new "product". It was maybe the worst tech demo I've ever seen. I was out 2 weeks later. I think the company dragged on for maybe another year.)
- simoncion 1y ago
  Ah. Nothing went wrong between the demo table and the finished product; the author is working with Mk. 1 products. Thanks much for the additional detailed background information. Sorry to hear about the slow demise of your former employer.

thangalin 1y ago

> but you still have to plug the device into a cable at some point That may explain why I can't find a 5 Gbps wireless USB extender for my work web cam. https://hardwarerecs.stackexchange.com/questions/18983/wireless-usb-extender https://hardwarerecs.stackexchange.com/questions/18983/wirel...