What went wrong with wireless USB (opens in new tab)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

Largest phone manufacturers of the time (Ericsson and Nokia) supporting and developing it surely helped.

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).

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.

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.

Bluetooth took off because it was easiest path to do wireless headsets when handsfree driving laws passed.

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)

Bluetooth FTP was widely supported until ~2009. All Nokia phones and many flip phones had it. iPhone did not, AOSP technically did, but carrier phones often had it disabled, and it slowly disappeared.

Windows 11 still supports it, I think macOS too. Pairing is technically optional.

Imo cloud storage like Dropbox has 95% solved this use case for years, which is why alternative solutions haven't popped up.

This is an UX problem, not a technical problem. You could easily use Wifi to transfer files between devices quite fast, there's just no agreed upon open protocol for it. Afaik that's how AirDrop works.

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.)

Transferring files between a phone and a computer was a real use case, but since wireless usb was "exactly like regular usb but no wires" it wasn't any easier to set up file transfer than regular usb (harder, actually, since you had to do the wireless bonding), and wired usb would charge your phone battery while the files transferred whereas wireless usb would drain it.

There's no formal standard, but I keep seeing this complaint from people who just haven't installed syncthing. At this point it's not inexistence but mere ignorance

Airdrop works. Ok, it's platform bound, but I'm sure it could be ported.

It's not such a big thing, though. I hardly use it, and young people don't seem to use it either. The stuff on their phone and laptop seem separate worlds, just like mine are. Might be because they don't know about it, though.

There are websites using WebRTC for p2p transfer.

scp works well for me.

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-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.)

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.

USB over QI wireless would be great.

Great post, but it's a bit disorienting. As I said in another post here:

> This is like a transmission from an alternate universe where the mice I used for decades didn't exist.

We later replaced the backpack with a home-made open mesh grid onto which the receiver was strapped.

But that just bought us a bit more run time without actually solving anything.

From what I’d gathered at the time, it was a common issue with products that relied on that specific chip, and I doubt most shared our use case.

[I am not a physicist]

Wouldn’t a fan in a backpack just move hot air including the heat of its motor?

...the MAC address barcode was below the MAC address, the PIN barcode was below the PIN.

They fixed it now.

Yep!

It would be a marginal. Improvement at a huge increase in complexity

Adjacent intention on the same action that leads to a connected computer, eg. I put my laptop on my friend table for storage, and it connects against my intention.

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.

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.

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?

>Basically, IP networking still allows direct connections, but also allows far more possibilities.

The downside is that need hub and its app to talk from phone to device. Matter using IP means phone can talk directly to device. Thread is separate network and needs bridge, but that can be simpler and generic. Thread/Matter use uncountable IPv6 space.

The protocol should allow it, even if the implementation perhaps limits users to the local network or some other more sensible security policy.

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.

Thread is low power like Zigbee even though it is IPv6 over the same radio. Implementing IP stack takes very little these days.

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.