Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Why Isn’t USB Wireless?”.
Usb connects everything from keyboards to crypto, wallets to those little nerf turrets that you can use to repel your co-workers so with it having so many common lightweight applications. Why hasn’t it just gone fully wireless as it turns out, there was an effort to do just that. All the way back in the mid 2000s, there was an official standard developed, simply called wireless usb, and the idea was to come out with a whole bunch of devices that would simply work with computers that had wireless usb transponders built-in. So we’re not talking about using a dongle where the actual device that you’re trying to use such as a mouse is not actually handling the usb signal itself. This was supposed to be native.
Wireless usb was designed to be as close as possible to wired usb, just without the wires. The protocols over which the signals were sent were very similar to how traditional usb communicates meaning wide compatibility with many devices should have been less of a challenge compared to introducing an entirely new standard. Of course, wireless communication is nearly always slower than a wired equivalent. Just compare your home wifi to a pc connected via ethernet, if you don’t believe me, but wireless usb was supposed to provide speeds, pretty darn close to usb 2.0, which was the dominant usb revision when the first wireless usb products hit the market in 2007.. Specifically, it had a maximum of per second the same as usb 2.0 from 3 meters away.
That’S 10 feet for our american friends, but it would also still operate at up to 110 megabits from 10 meters away, meaning that you could still reach a peripheral. Another room like a printer and wireless usb didn’t even need a direct line of sight between connected devices. Thanks to the fact that it used a fairly low frequency that could penetrate objects and walls, kind of like wi-fi, with lots of big industry players involved in trying to make this new untangled world a reality, including hp, intel, samsung and microsoft.
A wireless future seemed assured, and yet it never happened and we’ll tell you why, right after we thank brilliant for sponsoring this video brilliant is a website and app built around active learning, that’s accessible and fun. So you can get rid of your boring long lectures and exchange them for problem solving and interactive visuals there’s over 60 courses to choose from including their new everyday math course, which will give you a refresher on foundational math topics that you might not have touched since High school, so don’t wait, join the community of 10 million learners and educators today and the first 200 of you who, head to brilliant.org techwiki, will get 20 off an annual premium subscription. Probably the biggest reason.
Wireless usb failed is that it was late to the wireless party. Although the industry started working on the standard back in 2004, device makers had to get permission to use certain frequencies from communications authorities and that approval process took time, as it often does, with government bureaucracy. By the time wireless usb gadgets started appearing, then the convenience that they were supposed to enable was pretty much already taken care of by wi-fi and bluetooth.
Take our printer example. Why is wireless usb necessary when you can just connect your printer to a wi-fi network that has significantly greater range, or, let’s say you’re, trying to connect a wireless display? Intel’S wide eye was already a thing by the time wireless usb came out and, as the name implied it used, wi-fi direct which later evolved to support faster speeds at longer ranges than wireless usb. Could wireless usb was also touted as something that could be useful for storage, but unfortunately, it also came out right around the time that internet-connected cloud storage was starting to gain traction and people were more drawn to having their smartphone sync their photos with the cloud or Upload them to social rather than mess around, with storing them on their own hard drives. But regardless of the specific use cases, it was going to cost pc manufacturers more money to put wireless usb transponders inside their machines and there just wasn’t much incentive to do it.
If everyone was just going to use alternative technologies anyway, i mean heck. One of those alternatives was none other than usb 3.0, which ran at five gigabit per second much faster than both wireless usb and even wi-fi for that matter. So if you really needed that extra speed for quick file transfers, you were going to be using a cord anyway, so wireless usb was quickly relegated to the dustbin of tech, history and maybe one day, it’ll make a comeback. But until then we can admire apple’s, pioneering work in giving consumers as few ports as they possibly can. If you guys enjoyed this video go ahead and give it a like, if you didn’t well, hey, there’s that other button, not that you’ll know if anybody used it leave a comment. If you have a suggestion for a future fast as possible and don’t forget to subscribe, .