Stand aside, Bluetooth
This may be old news to many out there, but I just learned about Wireless USB (WUSB) today, a possible successor to the troubled “Bluetooth” standard.
Bluetooth is a short-range wireless technology that allows devices to communicate with each other wirelessly. It is different from “Wifi” in that it is not really meant for internet or networking applications, but rather for device-to-device communications, such as synching one’s phone or PDA with a computer, etc. But Bluetooth, while so many had high hopes for it and it still is considered a prime feature by some, has not taken off as fast as many would have hoped. Apparently it is simply not the easiest technology to implement. Its implementation has had reliability problems and of course the speed (rated to a max of 700kpbs, but in practice often a small fraction of that) is the one thing that makes it impractical for heavy-duty networking.
WUSB, a new standard that Intel, HP, Microsoft, and others are developing, has the potential for fulfilling all the potential of Bluetooth and then some. Such a standard would allow for speeds as great as the current USB 2.0 standard of 480mbps. Whether the ease of implementation or reliability would be better is anyone’s guess, but hopefully this consortium will learn a lesson from Bluetooth. Being based on the USB interface is also an advantage, as this part of the technology is already well-established. USB-enabled devices are ubiquitous and while Firewire competes with it and is actually preferred for some applications like video, a wireless technology could actually minimize firewire’s usage to an even smaller niche.
The other potential application that I can see for such devices would be in local wireless networks. Wimax, a developing technology that will provide large-range wireless networking (in the order of miles) at speeds of up to 70mbps, but in practice probably closer to 10mbps, could be the technology that makes all consumer DSL and cable internet connections obsolete. Providers would simply have to construct transmitters like cell towers are constructed today and cover the landscape with them. Ok, well, that’s not exactly “simple” but I can’t see why existing cell-towers couldn’t be used for the same purpose. In fact, with Voice Over IP technology, Wimax just may end up replacing standard cell phones. Even supposed 3G cell phone technology doesn’t hold a candle to Wimax speeds. But as fast as Wimax is, it can still be surpassed by at least seven times via the current highest USB speeds, and who knows if a USB 3.0 standard will come out and up the ante even further. In any case, Wimax could provide the bandwidth for most internet communications, but for certain applications one would want the higher speeds of WUSB. Of course local networking would benefit from such speeds, since transferring files from one computer to another would be much faster. But with the large files sizes from digital cameras that keep going up in resolution, and the increasing number of people using digital video cameras, the desire to share these with others increases, and even the desire for back-up services that use internet hosted off-site storage. If the past 20 years has taught us anything, it’s that as storage and bandwidth gets cheaper, technology also finds ways of filling these with larger files. Compression technologies can only go so far combating this trend. As this continues, a seven-fold (or probably much greater) increase in speed will be of huge benefit. Instead of places like Starbucks and Borders just offering plain old Wifi, we could see them fitted with truly massive pipes to the internet – 10Gbit or more - and then folks could bring in their devices that could talk to the router at WUSB speeds of 480Mps. One could download a DVD movie from an iTunes for movies type service in about a minute, one could do high-quality, perhaps even high-definition quality video teleconferencing, or more standard quality but with multiple people in different parts of the world. Or one could simply backup one’s entire 160GB hard drive to an online storage/back-up service in about 45 minutes. But such a large pipe might be prohibitive enough that the cost for using it might be a subscription fee in the $100’s. Who knows, but it’s fun to speculate anyway.
In any case, technologies that at least on the face of it could potentially increase the bandwidth by orders of magnitude and do it fairly quickly, easily, and inexpensively, just show that what we currently see as a huge change in how we communicate over the last five years, could equaled or even surpassed in the next five, or even fewer years.