USB goes Wireless The first devices submitted for Wireless USB certification have been approved, and four of them will be in US shops by the end of the summer. Laptops from Dell and Lenovo, as well as hubs (and adapters) from IO Gear and D-Link, are the first devices to receive Wireless USB certification: ensuring that they'll work properly …
"Observers predict European regulators will act quickly if grey imports mean the kit starts to appear in Europe."
Typical.
While the rest of the world acts, UK/EU civil servants sit on their Eliza Doolittles and do nothing.
If regulation is needed, then the PROPER time to take regulatory action is *before* the kit starts appearing, not after.
Just looked at the D-Link hub. It works backwards. What I want is wireless USB dongles I can plug into all the peripherals I have, and they talk wirelessly to the hub which then talks wirelessly to the pc. Or would that hub bit be redundant?
Anyway, all the current offering does is remove one wire between PC and hub. Not really worth it, imho.
USB 2.0 is already proving to be too slow for things like
hard drives etc. I can't believe for one minute we're actually
going to see 480mb/s actually happening over the wireless
bit, which means it's only really useful for keyboards and mice...
which have been wireless for years.
Wheres USB 3.0 when you want it!
Just because a product is available does not mean it should be approved! What are the side-effects of UWB devices in use? 480 MB/s is going to require a lot of power for anything than the shortest of distances. I'm thinking less of the health issues than the interference with other devices. I, for one, would rather have government regulate than pick up the pieces afterwards.
OFCOM is working towards UWB licensing by 21st August:
"UWB is a generic term for technologies typically characterised by the emission of very low power radiation spread over a very large radio bandwidth. Ofcom is required to comply with a European Commission Decision (the “Decision”), the implementation of which is mandatory on all European Union (EU) Member States by 21 August 2007."
http://www.ofcom.org.uk/consult/condocs/uwb_exemption/summary/
I was talking about this in the office last week, so you've got a wireless usb hub, what are you going to use it for.
Wow you can put you printer on the other side of the room, big deal. Or even in another room (oops now you have to walk to fetch your printouts).
What else, well you can put an external hard drive in another room. Why???
The only possible use I could think of is a webcam to be used for surveillance. But then you might as well just by a webcam with wifi that you can access from more than the single pc with the wireless usb hub.
In short this is a complete white elephant with no practical use at all.
@Brutus: I can't say much, but exactly what you ask for is coming, and we'll have it in the shops this Christmas, at least in some territories, and whenever there's DTI approval, it'll be ready here soon after.
@ChriZ: 480mb/s is the raw data rate that goes over the air, and it does actually do all that. As in all networking products, the raw air rate doesn't tell you everything; for a start, there's a lot of coding, error correction, and encryption overhead; but even after all that, it still consistently beats wired 100 megabit ethernet in real-world measurements.
@Charlie: The whole point of UWB is that it uses a variety of radio technology that allows you fast data rates at minimal power levels. It's designed to be low power so that it can be useful in battery-powered applications like cameras, phones and PDAs; if it killed the battery life, no-one would want it! The whole thing about using very wide bandwidth is that it's the area *under* the frequency-power graph that matters, and a signal that's very wide can carry just as much information at a *far* lower level than your normal narrow-band radio. Just FYI, the operating levels of UWB radios are a good few dB *below* the background noise levels!
Imagine the potential for now remotely accessing others USB devices via wireless. Question remains though what kind of security measures exist to stop USB-connected devices being accessed without the knowledge of the owner.
Whilst hijacking a mouse/keyboard connector may not achieve much outside of being usable as a prank, USB hard drives, cameras, etc present a more real threat to people.
Health effects: If radio waves were going to kill people, how did our species ever come to be, given that Earth has been bombarded with the entire electromagnetic spectrum since it coalesced about four billion years ago?
The magnetosphere/ozone layer/magical god, you say? How about AM and FM radio? How about TV signals? How about air traffic control? Those have been around for ages, and I've yet to see a total die-out of humanity. Don't even get me started on the RF that you're exposed to by everything from electric motors, your spark plugs in your car, and your home computer.
The BBC agrees with me: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/6914492.stm
Can we *please* stick a fork in the erroneous idea that RF is a health risk?
And, as a final thought, do you think the government is going to do any better at regulating "dangerous" RF, when they did so well at the "totally safe" thalidomide?
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