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.
dist-epoch · 58m 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.
kmarc · 1m ago
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 Most people (not the HN cohort) don't want to transfer "files", the abstraction of the file is either outdated for them or maybe even unnatural / unknown (younger generation).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 (folders etc).
As long as the entity they want to share magically shows up on the another device or at the other person they want to share with, they are happy. They just skip two levels of abstraction ("this photo is a FILE and I will use USB to transfer it"). Maybe a far fetched analogy but this is why most of the drivers of an automatic don't really think about clutches and how the torque of the engine's output is converted.
At least this is my perception (outside the IT bubble)
pca006132 · 2m ago
There are websites using WebRTC for p2p transfer.
dtech · 49m ago
Imo cloud storage like Dropbox has 95% solved this use case for years, which is why alternative solutions haven't popped up.
beezlewax · 9m 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.
dirkt · 41m ago
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.)
seba_dos1 · 32m ago
scp works well for me.
nurettin · 2h ago
I don't see why Bluetooth took off and wusb didn't. It must have something to do with marketing.
hnlmorg · 19m 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.
msh · 1h 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 · 1h 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 · 26m 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.
designerarvid · 2h ago
Largest phone manufacturers of the time (Ericsson and Nokia) supporting and developing it surely helped.
shahzaibmushtaq · 2h 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.
jauntywundrkind · 5h ago
This 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/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
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-...
classichasclass · 5h 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.
michelb · 9m ago
Didn't help you had to flip the signal up-down-up to get it working.
londons_explore · 2h ago
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 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.
dodslaser · 2h ago
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.
_Algernon_ · 2h ago
>Basically, IP networking still allows direct connections, but also allows far more possibilities.
freehorse · 1h ago
> allows far more possibilities.
>> attack surface, and give manufacturers access to way more information than I am comfortable with
When your device is on your WiFi you cannot be completely sure what it does (unless you monitor the traffic).
immibis · 1h ago
And requires more configuration! Sure let me just type a netmask into my headphones by tapping the volume buttons.
DonHopkins · 19m ago
Hey, is your root password still bazz1l?
explodes · 2h ago
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.
londons_explore · 2h ago
The protocol should allow it, even if the implementation perhaps limits users to the local network or some other more sensible security policy.
8n4vidtmkvmk · 9m ago
The implementation needs to be controllable and simple enough for basic users then. If something is possible, companies will abuse it.
mort96 · 23m ago
If the protocol allows it, products using the protocol will require it.
tossandthrow · 1h ago
This 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.
kevin_thibedeau · 2h ago
You're not going to get low power consumption with IP. That's a problem for small battery powered devices.
londons_explore · 1h ago
You will as long as the protocol is designed to be power efficient.
I agree though that existing WiFi networks are hard to connect to from devices where battery life needs to be measured in months.
fulafel · 1h ago
Bluetooth had networking already in the early days (PAN).
londons_explore · 1h ago
Still there on android phones.
It's so terribly slow it's almost unusable, but does seem to be substantiality more power efficient than running a WiFi hotspot all the time.
jajko · 7m ago
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.
brudgers · 1h ago
Maybe 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.
kensai · 5h ago
The 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?
frollogaston · 3h ago
Bluetooth is bad enough that wireless mice/keyboards usually have a USB dongle receiving what I guess is a proprietary RF protocol. Some wireless headphones have that too. And wifi requires too much power.
freehorse · 2h ago
I don't know why USB dongles are popular for manufacturers (I assume to make their product more plug-and-play friendly), but I don't think they are a better solution than bluetooth. For example, it is common that if another USB device is plugged close to a USB dongle, it can cause interference to it, which results to unstable connection and eg makes a mouse "jump", keystrokes not register etc. Finding the right place for a USB dongle can be a pain. USB dongles with proprietary RF protocols are usually a terrible solution imo. I have never had any similar kind of connectivity issues with a bluetooth mouse or keyboard.
notfed · 1h ago
Bluetooth's latency is just too slow for a mouse. Heck, Bluetooth is too slow for audio, too, but most people seem to be complacent to latency.
numpad0 · 3h ago
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.
Findecanor · 2h ago
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.
freehorse · 2h ago
> 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 interference from nearby active USB ports [0]. If you have ever had a "jumping" mouse while transfering big amounts of data through a port neighbouring your mouse's USB dongle, this is likely the reason.
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
freehorse · 1h ago
Is position estimation from the signal that accurate for that?
numpad0 · 2h ago
I mean, you can't type in BitLocker password wirelessly without a dongle. Optical mice sensors aren't so repeatable anyway, so missing a packet or two probably aren't so critical.
gizmo686 · 4h ago
Neither 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 · 3h ago
It 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?
sholladay · 4h ago
Better off with Bluetooth is something I never thought anyone would say.
troupo · 2h ago
> Are we not better off with Wifi and Bluetooth now?
Bluetooth is a nightmare of a standard. Up until very recently even pairing two devices was a non-deterministic operation. Apple went as far as creating their own chip with their own protocol for their headphones just not to have to deal with bluetooth.
Liftyee · 5h ago
Interesting 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 · 2h ago
Instead 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.
shahzaibmushtaq · 2h ago
In certain cases, plug-and-play interfaces outperform wireless mediums.
begueradj · 4h ago
Impressive. It sounds to be a thorough summary of Wirth's work.
lofaszvanitt · 3h ago
In the coming age of AI we can do our own communications protocols and leave behind the horrible bt and wifi implementations. Right? :D
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.
Wirelessly transferring files between a phone and a computer seems like a big use case. Still no easy standard way of doing it.
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 (folders etc).
As long as the entity they want to share magically shows up on the another device or at the other person they want to share with, they are happy. They just skip two levels of abstraction ("this photo is a FILE and I will use USB to transfer it"). Maybe a far fetched analogy but this is why most of the drivers of an automatic don't really think about clutches and how the torque of the engine's output is converted.
At least this is my perception (outside the IT bubble)
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.
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.
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.
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/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
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-...
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.
>> attack surface, and give manufacturers access to way more information than I am comfortable with
When your device is on your WiFi you cannot be completely sure what it does (unless you monitor the traffic).
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.
I agree though that existing WiFi networks are hard to connect to from devices where battery life needs to be measured in months.
It's so terribly slow it's almost unusable, but does seem to be substantiality more power efficient than running a WiFi hotspot all the time.
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.
Btw, is there a direct comparison anywhere regarding energy consumption of the competing standards in real situations?
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.
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 interference from nearby active USB ports [0]. If you have ever had a "jumping" mouse while transfering big amounts of data through a port neighbouring your mouse's USB dongle, this is likely the reason.
[0] https://www.usb.org/sites/default/files/327216.pdf
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.
Btw, do you have any other suspected reason (politics aside) that wireless USB did not catch on?
Bluetooth is a nightmare of a standard. Up until very recently even pairing two devices was a non-deterministic operation. Apple went as far as creating their own chip with their own protocol for their headphones just not to have to deal with bluetooth.