IT TRENDS
Set my PC port free
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Wireless USB brings the Ultra Wide Band’s speed to the PC’s most-used connection point
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— Photo: By special arrangement
Cutting out cables: D-Link’s Wireless USB hub (left) and Wireless adapter (right) can unshackle devices from data cables.
The Universal Serial Bus or USB is arguably the single biggest advance in the way personal computers ‘talked’ to their peripheral devices, since the first PCs came, provided with separate serial and parallel ports.
Easy task
For almost 10 years now, consumer desktops and laptops have come equipped with two or more of these new-age ports, which made the task of connecting a printer, a scanner, a digital camera or a joystick, relatively easy and justified manufacturer’s claims of ‘plug-n-play.’
The original speed of the USB connection — 12 megabits per second — soon gave way in 2000, to USB 2.0 which upped the speed of data transfer (theoretically) by a factor of 40, to 480 MBPS… though in practice such a speed is rarely achieved: more often than not, a USB 2 device is connected to a USB 1 port which brings the data speed down to the lower of the two speeds.
Peripheral manufacturers — especially printer makers — nevertheless embraced the USB standard, and for some years now, most consumer printers have totally abandoned the old ‘Printronix’ or parallel port and provide only one connect option: USB.
Huge opportunity
Around this time, storage players discovered a huge opportunity in USB-based plug-in devices which used Flash memory to create what were called pen drives, thumb drives or memory sticks ( the terms are used interchangeably)….. with rapidly increasing storage capacity that has reached 8 gigabytes.
The same USB port was also used to connect with the pocket drives or external hard disks that took portable storage to 400 GB or more.
But as every peripheral device maker jumped on the same US-bus, customers were often left with a cat’s cradle of wires and cables as they tried to deal with half a dozen or more USB devices latched to the same computer. USB hubs have been available for some time now.
For a couple of hundred rupees, they allowed one to connect four or more USB devices through a single USB port… and that only created even more device wires, snaking away from hub and PC.
There was only one sensible way to unshackle the computer from this chakravyuha of wires — convert the USB into a wireless port. The industry — notably the WiMedia Alliance and USB Implementer’s Forum — has done just this: It has combined the ubiquity of the USB port with the superior speed of Ultra Wide Band a short-range wireless data technology operating in the 3GHz to 10 GHz band, that is about 500 times faster than Bluetooth.
The result: Wireless USB. Last week, the first products to be certified as compliant to the new standard were unveiled.
They included two computing platforms: notebooks from Lenovo ( ThinkPad T61/T61p) and Dell (Inspiron 1720). Also launched were a Wireless USB 4-port hub (DUB 2240) and a wireless USB adapter ( DUB 1210) from D-Link, and similar hardware from IOGEAR.
The D-Link wireless hub can be used like any USB hub. That means you can connect all your current USB devices — printer, thumb drive, camera — as you would do now.
Changeover tool
The wireless adapter flips open to reveal a USB socket that plugs into the USB port of your PC or laptop and acts like a wireless ‘dongle’ which means it wirelessly links with the USB hub.
This combo therefore is a useful changeover tool, helping us go wireless with legacy USB devices. While D-Link has launched its Wireless USB products only in the US markets, the company plans to offer them in India as well in 2008 — earlier if demand is seen, with planned manufacture at its Goa plant. The public use of the Ultra Wide Band in India needs to be legalised first.
The beauty of Wireless USB is that having connected our old USB devices to our PCs through something like the D-Link hub-adapter combo (inevitably there will be other makes in the coming months) we can now enjoy the top speeds of data transfer achievable with USB 2.0 — without the wires: up to 480 MBPS at up to 3-metre distance and 110 MBPS even at 10 metres.
The WiMedia Alliance which backs Wireless USB , includes founder members like Intel, Sony, HP and Philips.
So we can expect all these players to come out with products for Wireless USB (there is a rival wireless USB standard, again at ultra wide band speeds, called CableFree USB, and promoted by FreeScale Semiconductors, but its products do not seem to be ready for market yet).
Says Ganesh Prasad, General Manager, Ultra Wide Band, Networking Operations, at Intel: “Now that the first wave of certifications of end-products is in place, we expect certified Wireless USB based solutions to be available in the marketplace as early as the end of this year.
Initial solutions
Initial solutions on the device side will be Wireless USB based hubs that will allow a user to connect their existing USB devices to the wireless hub. We expect devices to have natively integrated solutions by 2008.”
India can be expected to play a significant part in making this wireless explosion. A leading IT player like Wipro (through its Austrian subsidiary Wipro New Logic) has already established a strong brand in the UWB area.
There are an estimated 2 billion USB devices out there, and owners increasingly look for a hassle free way to transfer large files — photos, video clips, even entire desktops — from one device to another.
Backward compatible
By making Wireless USB backward compatible with the wired variety, the industry has cannily made it possible to ‘unwire’ this huge base of legacy devices.
Starting with some 11 million devices this year, analysts In-Stat predict that by 2010, there will be about 290 million wireless devices in use.
Even this estimated 30-fold growth may be overtaken by events; because having once experienced the convenience of wireless data interconnects, you, me and everyone else is going to say: “Unshackle me! I want to shift my data from here to there — through the air!”
ANAND PARTHASARATHY
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