I've been wondering when this would come out

http://www.biosmagazine.co.uk/article.php?id=2572

Wisair is determined to take USB cables off of the personal computer. The company has taken another step in the Ultra Wideband (UWB) industry with the release of a Wireless Universal Serial Bus (WUSB) reference design.

The new reference design includes a WUSB PC dongle and a WUSB hub, providing consumer electronics and peripheral manufacturers with the means to offer customers wireless connectivity to existing USB-enabled devices.

Printers, scanners, remote hard disk drives, digital cameras and mobile phones are able to plug directly into the WUSB Hub and receive wireless connectivity to a PC. The WUSB Hub replaces any wireline USB connection with a wireless connection.

The Hub, which features two or four ports for connecting existing USB devices, can also be placed at one side of a room, where it can then send data wirelessly to the PC at speeds up to 480Mbit/s. In fact, the WUSB Hub can be located more than 30-feet from a WUSB dongle plugged into a PC.

‘We are very excited about the traction that Wisair is making and expect to see our chipsets integrated into many products in 2006,’ said David Yaish, Wisair president and CEO. ‘In particular, our new WUSB reference design fulfils a strong market need for wireless connectivity to portable devices, a business decision validated as we have already secured agreements with multiple manufacturing partners.’

The 480Mbit/s WUSB Hub reference design is based on Wisar’s second-generation WiMedia-based UWB chipset and has a small, form-factor integrated antenna. The reference design offers robust performance in noisy environments and coexistence with 802.11a/b/g and Bluetooth devices.

With a complete end-user software package for management, control and association, the WUSB Hub provides OEM/ODM module manufacturers with quick time to market. Wisair plans to release a second generation, Certified Wireless USB version of the reference design early next year.

12/15/2005 4:27:01 PM

this is an incredibly good idea

12/15/2005 4:33:56 PM

i've had the IDEA forever. I just don't have the knowhow or ability to implement it. glad someone did!

w00t, wireless ipods, wireless hard drives, wireless card readers, wireless cameras!

apparently, i posted a similar story in april
http://www.thewolfweb.com/message_topic.aspx?topic=306153

it was a different venture, i think

[Edited on December 15, 2005 at 4:40 PM. Reason : .]

12/15/2005 4:38:39 PM

I guess this is significantly faster than Bluetooth?

12/15/2005 4:45:39 PM

call me crazy but up-front wouldn't the security for such devices be insanely difficult to maintain?

12/15/2005 4:45:59 PM

meh... i'm still waiting for full integration into the computer and the peripheral devices. It wounds like all this does is move the tangle of wires from behind the PC to somewhere behind all your other devices. By offering a wireless hub, you still have to plug wires into the devices into the hub. This does me no good when I have my printer on top of my desk, my scanner underneath it, my camera over to the side, external HDD sitting on the desktop, etc.

now maybe if they had dongle-to-dongle connections. i.e. plug a tiny USB dongle into my printer that would connect to the dongle in the PC, and other dongles into the other devices. But that would get prohibitively expensive if you're talking $15-20 minimum for each additional dongle. Maybe they should sell a kit with the PC dongle, a hub and 1 or 2 device dongles for devices that don't sit near other devices.

12/15/2005 4:46:40 PM

Quote :

"call me crazy but up-front wouldn't the security for such devices be insanely difficult to maintain?"

That was my first thought as well ... with USB printers / flash drives ... there's stuff at work I don't want somebody with a sniffer to be able to pick up. I think this has huge potential for home consumer market though.

12/15/2005 6:20:06 PM

http://us.gizmodo.com/gadgets/peripherals/cut-the-cord-usb-runs-free-with-freescale-149775.php

Belkin is jumping on the wireless USB bandwagon with this four-port hub. That's right, it's packing wireless USB, letting you roam free with any USB device. Using Motorola spinoff Freescale’s Ultra-Wideband (UWB) technology, this hot connection gives you data rates that are a hundred times faster than Bluetooth. So imagine, you walk into a room with your notebook, plug in the wireless USB dongle and you're instantly connected to that USB hard drive you have stashed under the desk. No wires, no muss, no fuss. We saw this device in a demo at CES (it's similar to the one from Ripcord that I told you about earlier), and besides that, it actually works and has an attractively-designed form factor, too. You'll have to wait until early spring of this year to give it a try, and when it ships Belkin says it will cost $129.99.

1/20/2006 4:10:18 PM