Wireless USB aims for 1Gbit/sec

Wireless USB (WUSB) speeds will approach a gigabit per second under plans set out by the industry group promoting the technology.

The Wireless USB Promotor Group is also starting work on a version 1.1 specification with improved power management and support for operation in spectrum beyond 6GHz.

Both these measures have an eye on mobile phone manufacturers who want power consumption reduced and lower frequencies left free for possible use in 4G links.

WUSB 1.1 is also taking a leaf out of the Bluetooth book by allowing devices to pair using Near Field Communication (NFC), meaning you should simply need to swipe them close to each other to establish communication.

Jeff Ravencraft, an Intel technology strategist and president of the Wireless USB Implementers' Forum, said the 1.1 spec should be ready in the first half of 2008 but products implementing it would not appear until around 18 months later. The faster data rate will come later still.

"I can't give you an exact date," said Ravencraft at a WUSB Developers Conference in Amsterdam.

Others at the conference pointed out that the timetable may depend on that for clearing bottlenecks in the operating system.

WUSB replaces the familiar USB cable with an ultrawideband (UWB) wireless link and over a distance of two metres the current version can hit the same theoretical maximum 480Mbits/sec as the wired one. The speed falls to a maximum 110Mbits/sec at 10 metres.

Real data throughput in both versions is far less in practice due to protocol overheads, and bottlenecks in the PC hardware and operating-system. Ravencraft said first-generation products, which convert existing USB devices to WUSB by the use of dongles and wireless hubs, are particularly slow because they carry the overheads of both the wired and wireless protocols.

Chips for so-called native devices, which drive Wireless USB directly, are already available and could appear in products as soon as next year. Ravencraft predicted that half a billion WUSB devices would be in use worldwide by 2011 - most of them mobile phones.

Several US delegates at the conference said WUSB devices in that country had sold out shortly after hitting the shelves. The products have only just been approved for use in the UK, with a more restricted spectrum than is available in the US.

Ravencroft said the restrictions would reduce the choice of alternative frequencies where contention between neighbouring WUSB systems became an issue but it would not affect bandwidth.

See also Test Bed blog Wannabe mobile WUSB competes with next-generation Bluetooth

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