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 · 1h 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.
begueradj · 45m ago
Impressive. It sounds to be a thorough work.
So much work done by Nicklaus With.
kensai · 1h 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 · 6m 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.
gizmo686 · 1h 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.
sholladay · 1h ago
Better off with Bluetooth is something I never thought anyone would say.
Liftyee · 1h 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...
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-...
So much work done by Nicklaus With.
Btw, is there a direct comparison anywhere regarding energy consumption of the competing standards in real situations?
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.