Recently much has been written about the BT SIG’s decision to add WiFi (announced at the GSMA conference opening a few weeks ago in Barcelona) as a means of speeding up certain BT applications in cell phones. Many have conjectured that this announcement means the BT SIG is walking away from UWB. Though controversy and battles makes for more interesting reading, the truth behind this logical choice is much more boring and straight forward than the technology battle it has been portrayed as. On the one hand, it is pretty easy to see why the BT SIG chose to add WiFi as an alternative transport for BT profiles. Simply put, many high-end cell phone manufacturers are adding WiFi to their handsets for both internet access and VoIP services. So, with WiFi already in the phone, using a radio that is “free” and paid for is a pragmatic choice. Another reason to consider adding WiFi is that for many mid-range phones, there is insufficient processing power available on the main applications SOC to be able to keep up with more than about 50Mbps of data. Therefore, the lower throughput of WiFi better matches the available CPU horsepower for many phones.

One way to think of this strategy is that the BT SIG is choosing to have three gears in their radio shifter box – 1st gear, 2nd gear, and turbo overdrive. To simplify the analogy, we can think of today’s BT2.1 as the low gear – about 2Mbps of throughput. The next gear up would be WiFi, which has a throughput of about 20Mbps – or 10x faster than low gear. And finally, the jump up to UWB or turbo overdrive. In the short term, the UWB throughput will be over 200Mbps. Within a year, that throughput will jump up to 500Mbps. Therefore UWB represents another 10x improvement in throughput over WiFi for essentially the same power budget. Thought of another way: basic BT is a 2HP lawnmower, WiFi is a 20HP Vespa scooter, and UWB is a 200HP V-6 or 500HP sports car that gets 10x better gas mileage as the Vespa. Interestingly, UWB will essentially be selling for a penny per Mbps when it ships in volume! If BT had the same cost structure, it would cost 3 cents for a BT chip, and 54 cents for a WiFi chip. So economically speaking, UWB is also a very cost-effective means to turbo charge wireless data transfers.

The more interesting challenge for Dr. Foley and the BT SIG as they adopt both WiFi and UWB as speed boosters for BT application profiles is how these new radios will be effectively marketed to consumers. I suspect if you were to ask Joe Consumer what he thinks about the idea of an improved BT standard that is 10x faster he would likely respond that he can’t listen that fast. Why? Because most consumers equate the BT brand with their “hands free” ear piece. However, it is not difficult to imagine a scenario where two teenagers who have BT-HDR (BT over WiFi or UWB) phones transferring photos from one phone to another. Transparent to them, it will simply go 10x faster than if the phones only had BT in low gear. Or will it? WiFi is normally used in a client-server access point to device connection model. But two cell phones exchanging pictures would require a peer-to-peer type of connection. OK, so use the WiFi ad hoc mode instead. However, the trouble with ad hoc mode is that most corporate access points are designed with the ability to turn it off in any WiFi radio within range. This is possible through the use of a Network Allocation Vector (NAV); and it occurs when an access point observes interference due to “hidden nodes” such as an ad hoc network. (Ad hoc mode would effectively disrupt WiFi network planning of the corporate IT department – thus motivating them to disable ad hoc mode on their premises). Therefore, if WiFi acceleration of BT applications were to become at all popular (which is the objective of the BT SIG) corporate networks would very quickly disable any ad hoc networks they detected – thus disabling the 2nd gear and relegating the use of WiFi based BT applications to connectivity at home or outside away from any corporate networks. In contrast, UWB has been designed since its inception to include a peer-to-peer network. So, UWB turbo overdrive is not fraught with the same technical impediments as WiFi will be. Nevertheless, BT over WiFi will happen. It is a very logical progression for BT to take. With Certified Wireless USB having chosen UWB to eliminate USB cables on the PC, and the BT SIG having chosen UWB for their top gear in the cell phone space, we are moving ever closer to a Life Without Wires™.

I attended the GSMA (formerly 3GSM) Mobile World Congress conference in Barcelona, Spain two weeks ago. The show is all about anything and everything mobile - from handsets and billing systems to new technologies.

As a technologist, I track the new and emerging services and wireless technologies. One of the most hyped new technologies is WiMax - which has been pushed heavily by Intel over the last few years. Most recently in the US, WiMax suffered somewhat of a setback when Sprint decided not to bet their next generation network on the technology as had originally been announced by their former CEO.

What struck me in my wanderings around GSMA this year, is that the WiMax emperor seemed to have been dethroned. Certainly there were many different WiMax products, services and so forth on display. However, 3G and LTE seemed to have been taking over center stage. I don’t mean to say that there won’t continue to be WiMax deployments; but, there seemed to have been a lot of chatter about how WiMax was not gaining any traction in the major GDP countries of the world.

Sean Maloney and Intel, together with the Intel treasury department, have been one of the major band leaders for WiMax. The early promotions touted that WiMax was more than 2x better than 3G. However 3G and LTE are generally seen by operators as incremental upgrades to their network. Not so for WiMax. With good progress now being made on LTE, the 2x advantage of WiMax is fading. Further, many of Intel’s largest customers are deploying laptops with 3G adapters built-in or they are bundling 3G ExpressCards with their laptops. Intel’s strategic reason for investing in WiMax in the first place, was supposedly to bring higher bandwidth to processors more quickly than the cellular community was otherwise going to get there. Naturally they planned on selling a few WiMax chips along with their WiFi chips. However, to do a good job on RF chips like WiMax, Intel really can’t build them in their own fabs - which are optimized for processors. They have to build them in industry fabs such as TSMC. So if 3G and LTE are meeting the laptop needs that WiMax was supposed to fill, and Intel can’t use their own fabs to build their WiMax chipsets, and no tier-1 GDPs are widely deploying WiMax, then the question has to be asked: When will Intel and the rest of the WiMax community realize that it is time to redirect their R&D efforts on other priorities? Only time will tell. This wouldn’t be the first time that I was wrong about the direction a new technology was headed, but walking the floor at GSMA certainly made me think that WiMax will be a faded rose by next year’s show.

While WiMax may not turn out to be one of the pivotal technologies in the coming era of Life Without Wires™, it is an interesting lesson in “good enough.” It is also a reason why UWB will ultimately become widely deployed for high speed, battery efficient connectivity between portable devices and PCs or with one another. WiMax, as it was originally conceived, had about a 2x advantage over early 3G. But that was before the advent of femtocells and LTE. Now the 2x advantage is being eliminated by steady progress in mainstream technologies. The risk (and capital) is no longer worth the costs. In contrast, UWB is 8-10x more battery efficient per megabyte of data transferred than WiFi, due to the nature of radio physics - the wider the frequency band used, the more efficient the radio. Unlike WiFi, UWB’s inherent advantage is then compelling enough to justify its introduction as a new radio technology. Today’s UWB rates are at 480Mbps. Within a year, it will be operating at speeds from 1Gbps to 2Gbps, costing well under 1 penny per Mbps. If Bluetooth were that cheap, a Bluetooth solution would cost less than a nickel! This is why I believe that UWB will ultimately become a multi-hundred million unit market and that WiMax is likely destined to be a niche solution for segments of the spectrum that have already been purchased in smaller economies.

In a blog written about Life Without Wires™, it is interesting to note the announcement made recently by the CEO of Motorola in what amounted to an admission that Motorola plans to sell or spin off their wireless handset business.

Handsets, after all, were the fourth wave in the evolution of technologies that free us from wires – first was wireless Morse code for telegrams, second was the radio, third was the television, and fourth was the cell phone – which was pioneered by Motorola, no less.

A lot has already been written in respected business publications about what went wrong at Motorola. Plummeting from #2 market share in a billion dollar industry to #4 or perhaps even #5 in such a short period of time is a remarkable freefall, so naturally this debacle has attracted lots of ink. For my part, I don’t proclaim to be an industry pundit with secret inside information upon which I can base my own opinion. However, not being an industry insider circulating among the popularized gossip circles of the cellular industry perhaps gives me a fresh outsider’s perspective.

Though none of us on the outside know all of the inner details, I don’t think history is likely to write that the majority or even the plurality of the blame for Moto’s demise in handsets can be laid at the feet of Ed Zander, the Silicon Valley icon brought in to rejuvenate Motorola a few years back. My own armchair quarterbacking says there were a few more factors.

First, is Moto’s corporate culture. Students of management familiar with the work of Ichak Adizes can recognize in Motorola’s handset business all of the classic signs of the worst traits of a formerly successful business that has evolved into a “big company.” Moto became one with a culture that competed with itself, didn’t permit calculated risk, concentrated decisions too high up in the organization and was ultimately overrun by faster, more aggressive and more creative competitors – such as Samsung. Corporate cultures take a long time to go bad, and they take a lot of effort to fix. Ed Zander’s mistake was to believe that a simple reorg or two together with a few interviews and snappy slogans would be sufficient to fundamentally remake a non-competitive corporate culture. The market evidence of this failed tactic is overwhelming. Take the diversity of cell phone models Motorola was offering shortly after the introduction of their hit Razor phone, for instance. Moto didn’t come out with swivel phones or slider phones or the like. Instead, they cloned the razor in tiny incremental steps, but didn’t keep up in the features race or experiment with new types of phones. A trivial example perhaps, but very indicative of a culture problem nonetheless. Nobody wanted to be responsible for a possible flub – so every product group decided to build a variant of the hit phone HQ loved. Another example of their failed culture is the abortive attempt to build an iPod-esque phone with Apple. This was the phone that played 100 iTune songs – remember it? Clearly Moto had the first crack at working with Apple to build what has since become the iPhone. But nope – the Schaumburg guys and corporate types from the cornfields outside of Chicago knew better than Steve Jobs did. They didn’t get the vision. So, Apple went elsewhere. Ouch. What a lost opportunity.

A second contributor to Moto’s handset biz downfall is one which I have not seen anything written about yet. It is the spin off of Motorola’s semiconductor unit – now a privately held company named Freescale Semiconductor. If you look at the financial performance of Freescale when it was a public company, it was clear that the wireless division that supplied Moto’s handset division had terrible margins versus those of other major suppliers in the handset market. Yet, the other divisions of Freescale, within a few quarters of their IPO, were operating at margins on par with their respective market segment competitors. I conclude therefore that fundamentally, the Freescale chips themselves – which had once been driven by the Moto handset division – were not competitive in cost, features, and/or time-to-market. Since a high percentage of the cost of manufacturing a cell phone is the chips that they are built from, Motorola’s culture clearly used their captive semiconductor unit as a form of indentured servant. Essentially not permitted to compete on the open market, it was therefore unable to stay sharp and be fully in tune with the harsh market realities of a rapidly evolving global cell phone marketplace. This is directly attributable, of course, to problem number one: a non-competitive and stagnant corporate culture.

Finally, a third issue in the unfortunate demise of Motorola’s handset division was their board – the board that left Mr. Galvin in his position for too long, and the same board that brought in a brilliant exec best known for his career in building servers at Sun Microsystems, who’s only previous cellular experience was owning one.

It is indeed a shame to lose the only major cell phone manufacturer in North America. It didn’t have to happen. However, great success can often lead to a corporate culture’s hardening of the arteries that over time ends in a company that is no longer competitive. This pattern has been repeated by many companies. Some turn things around. Sadly, many don’t. But, the history of major brand names is that they do not disappear. So, don’t expect Moto to vanish. Conversely, don’t expect a quick rebound following the sale or spin out of the cell phone group either. Changing corporate cultures to perform at the peak of market competitiveness takes time – and a lot more time than a simple reorg can accomplish.

I recently attended the 2008 edition of CES – the Consumer Electronics Show. There have been lots of reports about the show already, but perhaps a few more comments won’t hurt.

To be candid, most of my time was spent meeting with customers. However I did spend many hours walking the floors looking for interesting trends and new technologies. One of the technology demonstrations that caught my eye, literally, was the OLED product demonstration by Sony. The pictures were absolutely dazzling and without equal. Notably however, the content being shown was a series of stunning photos in a slide show sequence. Made me wonder how the picture would look with moving video action sequences. Though the technology is often ballyhooed for how thin the screen can be made, what captured my imagination was the picture quality and brightness. If the manufacturing and lifetime issues can be overcome, OLED HDTVs have a bright future.

Another interesting trend was the introduction of LCD HDTVs with pixel counts four times that of a standard 1080-P television. That is right, you aren’t done once you buy your 1080-P set. The trend is for more pixels and at greater color depth; from 8bits per color to 10, 12 and perhaps even 14 bits. Where this will be most noticeable will probably not be in movies as much as it will be in photographs shown on your HDTV. With the popularity of photo frames exploding, it won’t be long before you will be able to very easily show your photos in slideshow mode on your HDTV. But even better, you’ll be able to purchase stunning photo sequences from the web that will turn your idle HDTV into a gorgeous photo frame – one that’s 52” or more.

Samsung was demonstrating an interesting feature of their forthcoming HDTVs which they call “Wise Link Pro”. On many HDTVs today, there is a USB port on the side of the set. This can be used for firmware upgrades, or for displaying photos. Wise Link Pro takes this capability one step further. It enables the HDTV to read a USB flash drive and display photos or various forms of video as well. Extending Wise Link Pro from its current wired USB implementation to Wireless USB therefore seems like a simple step. Wouldn’t it be great to be able to sit on the couch with your laptop and display any content from your PC wireless to your HDTV using Wireless USB?

A variation of the wireless Wise Link Pro idea above was demonstrated by Alereon. Partnering with DisplayLink, a display technology startup, Alereon demonstrated the prototype of a PC accessory aftermarket product. The demo wirelessly connected a laptop with a Certified Wireless USB adapter based upon an Alereon chipset to a small (about the size of a deck of cards) wireless graphics adapter based on chips from both Alereon and DisplayLink. The advantage of this particular laptop-to-HDTV demonstration is that it connected to one of the auxiliary video inputs on the back of the HDTV using a small cable from the back of the wireless video adapter. This enables any laptop running XP or Vista to connect to any HDTV that has an extra video input. An additional advantage is that the text and graphics normally associated with Windows applications are transferred without compression, so they look flawless. Likewise, video sequences, such as DVDs or Web based video clips, are typically transferred with visually lossless compression at very high data rates; therefore looking very crisp on the screen. Wouldn’t it be great to edit your photos, watch a slide show, browse the web, catch up on email, or display a DVD on your 52” Plasma HDTV all without leaving the comfort of your easy chair? That is just one of the many exciting applications in the era of Life Without Wires™.

During CES in Las Vegas this past week, Sony demonstrated their own proprietary form of UWB they called “Transfer Jet”. It is a very low power version of UWB operating at 1000 times less power than standard UWB signals – which are already 100 times less than WiFi or Bluetooth. The frequency spectrum they used is at 4.5 GHz, plus or minus about 260 MHz. The range of the link was very short – about 1 inch. Yes that is right, about one inch. Essentially Transfer Jet is meant for an almost direct contact between a portable device, such as a digital camera, and a PC or an HDTV, or perhaps between two portable devices. Sony’s point in their presentation was that for many consumers, the natural thing to do with a portable device is to bring it very close to the device they wish to connect to. Intuitively, I can see this. Sony further envisions this technology being used in as a form of communications for point-of-sale transactions. For example, think about a case where you’d touch your cell phone to a photo kiosk. You’d electronically pay for prints through your cell phone and transfer the pictures at the same time. This would occur at high speed so as not to waste your time or test your patience. The speed of Sony’s technology was stated to be just over 500 Mbps. In other words, about 10% faster than the international standard version of UWB called WiMedia (the basis of Certified Wireless USB).

To me, the peculiar thing about Sony’s demonstration of a proprietary UWB solution is that it doesn’t appear to provide any value over simply using industry standard WiMedia UWB, an industry group of which Sony is a member. In particular, if Sony were to use an Alereon UWB chipset transferring at 480 Mbps and operate it at 1000 times less power than standard FCC transmit power levels – the same as Transfer Jet – the range for our industry standard solution would be about 2 to 4 inches. Moreover, when operated at normal power levels, the distances could be much longer. Since Alereon’s chipset distance can be controlled by software, it would have been far easier for Sony to simply give Alereon a call and then write some software, than spend three years developing a new chipset akin to being a Memory Stick. Moreover, Sony’s Transfer Jet technology was cited as having been developed to avoid various international regulatory issues facing UWB technology outside of Japan. However, Transfer Jet only works in the 4.5 GHz band, which would make it an illegal in China when used with portable devices and would likely also be illegal in Europe after 2010. In contrast, Alereon’s UWB chipset, based upon the accepted ISO international UWB standard, is software programmable to work in Japan, the US, Europe, Korea and China due to its ability to support all UWB frequency bands from 3.1 GHz up to 10.6 GHz.

I admire Sony research for the brilliant work they have done in OLED technology, in Blu-Ray and in many other areas of consumer electronics. I also like their use of Transfer Jet UWB for close contact connectivity — it is an intuitive usage model for portable electronics. However time has shown that proprietary standards, such as Sony’s Memory Stick or iLink, don’t become industry standards just because they come from Sony. Proprietary standards become industry standards only when they offer highly compelling advantages over other alternative technologies, such as Sony’s Blu-Ray does over HD-DVD. Since Sony announced their intention to ship products with Transfer Jet in time for the holiday season in 2009, they still have time to make Transfer Jet a valuable piece of software, using the international standard form of UWB based upon an Alereon chipset (or a chipset from one of our competitors).The advantage to Sony would not only be that the technology would work at high speeds and close contact, but it could also be used at farther distances and for connectivity to the entire world of UWB devices that are in development (as well as PCs that have already begun shipping UWB technology). Only time will tell if Transfer Jet is the next Memory Stick, BetaMax, or the UWB version of Blu-Ray. In any case, Transfer Jet clearly demonstrates that Sony believes UWB technology should be the portable electronics basis of a future Life Without Wires™.

There has been a lot written lately about Android, the so-called Google Phone platform. There are even short video introductions on YouTube about the developer’s kits as well as the announcement of a Google contest for the coolest applications. Since I don’t have time to build my own entry into the Google Phone contest, here is my virtual contest submission.

Some time ago I posted a blog (see iPhone – a Truly Elegant and Innovative Product – So What About the Future?) discussing the possibilities of an ultra smart phone if it were powered by a processor such as the Qualcomm Snapdragon processor that was introduced one year ago. In the context of the Google Phone, let me take that concept a bit further as the basis of my virtual contest entry – the Clean Desk™ wireless docking station. But first, imagine for a moment an ultra smart phone powered by a high performance, low power processor. It might be the new VIA Eden processor, the Marvel XScale processor, the much rumored low power portable Intel CPU, or very impressively, the Qualcomm 1GHz Snapdragon – which is my personal favorite. Now include the Android mobile platform, which is essentially mobile Linux with lots of middleware added. Naturally, such a Google Phone would have to also include a cellular internet access feature. Let’s presume it’s 3G (doesn’t look like it will be Why-Max? given Sprint’s recent decision). Now add some secret ingredients – Certified Wireless USB of course, and built-in Google apps. The question you may be wondering is – what makes a phone like this so novel?

What makes this form of ultra smart phone interesting is the following: By incorporating Certified Wireless USB, the phone would be able to connect to any PC peripheral that also has Wireless USB. Very importantly, it would also be able to connect to a Wireless USB docking station – what we call Clean Desk™. The Clean Desk™ Wireless USB docking station is essentially the same as your current laptop docking station, but with a wireless connection to your Google Phone. The dock would include a cable connection to your current 22” DVI LCD monitor, so you wouldn’t have to buy a new monitor. It would have four USB ports so you could use your current wired printer. It would have an ethernet connection so you could access a corporate network. It would include stereo sound and might even include a 500GB hard drive as an option. Finally, it would probably have a standard wireless mouse and keyboard. Now what?

Imagine sitting down in front of your Clean Desk™ wireless docking station. You’d have your Google Phone on your belt, and it would connect wirelessly to your Clean Desk™ docking station over Certified Wireless USB. You could then access the internet or answer email/Gmail. If you needed to use a word processor – you could fire up Google Docs. If you needed to work on a presentation or a spreadsheet – same thing, Google Docs. Further, when you were away from your Clean Desk™, you could use your wireless internet link over 3G to access your projects on, you guessed it - Google Docs. You would essentially have all of the capabilities of a laptop, sans the laptop. Instead, you would only need an ultra smart Google Phone. One more thing: what you don’t need is Microsoft Office and what you wouldn’t have is “Intel inside.” Wow – now there’s a paradigm shift!

I don’t expect the Clean Desk™ or the ultra smart Google Phone paradigm to change the world over night. But I have to say that the concept has a very natural appeal. With Clean Desk™ you could still hold onto your “legacy” Windows Laptop, so long as it includes Wireless USB. Certainly large corporations that have years of institutional investment in Microsoft applications won’t easily be able to make the switch. Nevertheless, there are a lot of users who would find the Clean Desk™ – Google Phone duo a pretty compelling way to connect to the world and have on-demand, free, productivity applications from the world’s number one advertising company - Google. You can imagine real estate agents, house wives, house husbands, students, small businesses, sales people, and more who might find this paradigm a lower hassle, lower cost and very mobile approach to next generation computing. And central to it all is the ability to leverage the entire PC infrastructure of devices (and future devices) using Certified Wireless USB plus my virtual entry to the Google Phone contest: a Clean Desk™ wireless docking station. That is the power of Life Without Wires™. When will you see such a product? You never know, it could potentially happen a lot sooner than you think.

As a general rule, it is rare that I have time during the course of a normal business day to write an entry for my blog. Nearly all of my entries are written at an altitude of 30 thousand feet, and this one is no exception. I have read with interest all of the various comments on my recent post where I discuss some of the early product reviews for Wireless USB. I want to extend my true appreciation for those that wrote the initial reviews, as well as to those who commented on my musings (the comments received via email to our PR agency are included with permission below). Ultimately your comments are likely to reflect those of many early customers, so the feedback is welcome – even if it sometimes stings a bit. You are certainly entitled to your perspective.

So here are my thoughts. First, don’t misunderstand me, the initial Wireless USB products are certainly not speed demons. Further, they do not necessarily represent what the underlying technology is truly capable of. Rather, they represent the results of the initial standard attempting to make the vast billions of today’s wired USB devices play as seamlessly as possible with the new world of Certified Wireless USB when using a common everyday USB port. These initial results have a lot of protocol overhead, resulting in throughput of approximately 35 Mbps. Certainly fast enough for connecting to a wireless printer and in most cases more than adequate for saving files to a remote hard disk drive plugged into a wireless hub – but undoubtedly short of the inherent capability of the technology. Conversely, the early products do in fact have more throughput capability than may be apparent when connecting to a wireless hub. In particular, most have been designed to be capable of connecting to what are called native Wireless USB devices. These are devices with a native Wireless USB implementation that does not require protocol conversion. Our testing has demonstrated throughput of more than twice that of a Wireless USB hub. Further, one of our early customers had planned on introducing a product in October meant at enabling file sharing using USB adapter-type products. We had consistently measured throughput for this particular product at over 125 Mbps. Unfortunately it became the victim of late timing and was not taken to market. Though not necessarily a product of broad general interest, it would have been a useful product in so far as it would have clearly demonstrated the future potential of UWB based products.

For those of you who are wondering about what is really possible and when you will see it, let me offer an “insiders” view. For implementations which use a Cardbus card or the PCE-Express port of an ExpressCard, my expectation is that these products will average twice the throughput of the initial products for wireless hubs. Further, at CES 2008, Alereon expects to introduce some new types of video-oriented products based upon native Wireless USB implementations which today demonstrate sustained throughput over 150Mbps. As companies such as Alereon and others gain more experience with implementing Wireless USB, I expect to see products shipping by Q2 of next year that will demonstrate throughput of over 200Mbps. So, for those of you who are anxious for everyone to enter the new era of Life Without Wires™, don’t judge the full capabilities of the technology on one particular class of early protocol conversion products.

I look forward to reading your suggestions for improvements in Wireless USB as well as your other comments. I am most interested in your suggestions for new and compelling products.

Comments:
Patrick Mannion (Editor-in-Chief, TechOnline)

I agree with what he’s saying, and that’s partly reflected in my teardown (http://www.techonline.com/product/underthehood/196802178) of the Belkin router earlier this year (used Wisair’s non-WiMedia-compliant chip). It never came close to the promised rates of UWB proponents, but it did provide quick and easy setup and convenient wireless access at usable rates. Not bad for the first product out the door. I got slammed by the competition for ‘letting them off the hook’ with that last statement (which I used in my review), but I stand by it.

Looking forward to the next generation of devices…

Jon Titus (Herriman, UT)

Thanks.  Your CEO has a point, but the wired vs. wireless comparisons remain valid when people have a choice.  If I can run a wire between my PC and printer, why go wireless?  Maybe I want to clean up the plenum of wires behind my desk.  Or I want to move a printer off my desk and can’t easily run a wire the kids won’t trip on.  So, I want to know what options and tradeoffs I have.  Maybe I’ll keep the wired mess behind my desk in exchange for a faster USB connection.

In some cases, wireless USB may provide the only communication medium–much like a cell phone in a car.  Then I’d agree that comparison of wired vs. wireless connections make no sense except to let people know the difference in the capabilities of the media.  People should know not to expect the same performance from wireless USB that they get from a wired connection.  To get that information across, someone must compare wired and wireless operation.

Bill Ray (The Register)

Interesting to see the problems of having a new category of product haven’t gone away: I remember the same accusations being leveled at Bluetooth when it first came along.  When reviewers have nothing to compare the product to then they tend to come unstuck.

At The Register we’ve only reviewed one Wireless USB device, the Icron WiRanger, and as that requires mains power at both ends it’s not really wireless as you describe.

Wireless USB is taking a little longer to penetrate on this side of the pond, and it will be interesting to see how the products are reviewed, but I suspect it’s going to take a few years before people start to realise what you can do with the technology.

Jason Salzenstein (National Style & Travel Editor, EDGE Publications)

Hmm… interesting, but as an often jaded and sometimes bitchy writer myself, I have to say that he sounds a bit out of place. Or in need of stronger PR to spin it in a different way- and by that I DON’T mean that you guys aren’t doing a good job, but rather than instead of defending his product against mis-informed reviewers, perhaps it would be better to either focus on making a better product, or forgetting the bad reviews and focusing on other customers/angles…

I understand what he’s saying, but as someone who deals with and writes for basic (i.e. “stupid”) consumers, I also know that they don’t care about comparing apples to apples; if it seems like it even could be similar to something else, the average person wants it to perform like that ’something else,’ regardless of whether it should or not, technically speaking. Because as we know, it’s not about reality, but perception, and if the customer perceived the products to be the same, then they are- and whomever can bring that into reality (just like mobile phones were brought up to the same quality as home phones) wins.

Just my thoughts.

Glenn Fleishman (Editor, Wi-Fi Networking News)

You’re ignoring price. People shouldn’t pay $200 for the convenience of cutting one cable.

Wireless USB will shine when the radios are built into peripherals and the drivers ship with the operating systems. Then you’ll have devices scattered around, no driver installation and management, and the benefits you’re talking about — and not spend $200 for the privilege of cutting a single wire.

See also, Maury Wright’s blog: “Wireless USB exec questions press reviews based on actual specs“

Some of the early reviews for the first Certified Wireless USB PC Accessory products are now coming to press. Many of them are not particularly flattering. Some of the comments are valid enough. Others I think are a bit off base. What I find interesting, however, is how so many reviewers don’t seem to learn from the past and have conducted essentially baseless and rather useless reviews of these first products.

One of the first class of products to reach the market are classified and typically sold as a Wireless USB hub and adapter. This is an unfortunate choice of marketing, but that is the situation. The typical reviewer then does a comparison between the wireless product and its wired counterpart. That sounds fair enough . . . but is it really? Is it relevant to compare the throughput of the wireless product against the wired product? You wouldn’t compare the speed of your WiFi adapter against the integrated gigabit Ethernet adapter in your PC would you? No contest – the Ethernet wire always wins. Likewise, you wouldn’t compare the voice quality of your cell phone against your traditional analog voice line. Rather, you weigh whether or not it is good for its intended use. I for one, consider my cell phone far more convenient for making phone calls on-the-run vs. looking for a pay phone – even if the voice quality is lacking. My point is, reviews should be based upon how people are likely to use a product and whether or not it is helpful for that use.

So, what uses is a wireless hub best suited for? Probably many things, but the ones most developers have in mind for now are: Wireless USB access to a standard PC printer and Wireless USB access to an external hard drive. In your home, this means you would be sitting on the couch in your den with your laptop, and could wirelessly connect to a printer that is plugged into the wireless hub sitting on the desk behind you (remember, this is a cable replacement –e.g. in room technology – not an alternative for a whole house network). It also means, that from the couch with your laptop, you would be able to wirelessly transfer files to a HDD, which is also plugged into the wireless hub sitting on the desk behind you. For printing, the throughput of the wireless hub and plugged-in printer is more than adequate and in fact very convenient. If a reviewer wants to make a comparison, compare the convenience of laying a 16-foot USB cable on the floor from your laptop to the printer. Compare getting up and moving around with your laptop while it’s tethered to that cable.  In the wireless case – no problem. In the wired case, you just knocked over a lamp and taught your kids a new curse word sequence. The Wireless USB hub wins hands down. It is also amusing to compare flash drive usage. Tell me, who is going to get up from the couch and their laptop, walk across the room, plug their USB flash drive into their wireless hub, then walk back over to the couch and sit down? Nobody of course. They would just plug the flash drive directly into a port on the side of their laptop and wirelessly connect to the hub. The wired vs. wireless comparisons are like testing a hub to see what kind of paper weight it makes (not very good). Wrong paradigm.

In summary, I find it a bit disappointing that reviewers are making comparisons against wired products, instead of reviewing the Wireless USB products for the new, convenient applications they enable. It will always be true that a wired connection will communicate faster than a wireless link. What makes wireless products unique is their mobility and convenience. That is what a Life Without Wires™ is all about. That isn’t to say the first products on the market are perfect or flawless. They aren’t. But they do bring a new form of convenience to the market that hasn’t been available before: the familiar USB plug-and-play and ease of use, including backward compatibility to important USB devices such as printers and external hard drives.

For those of you interested in the future of Life Without Wires™ you may or may not be aware that a large portion of the old analog TV radio spectrum will soon be auctioned off by the government. The current chairperson of the FCC, Kevin Martin, has been widely quoted as saying that the aim of the FCC is to utilize the 700 MHz spectrum for a combination of public safety and open access to new and innovative broadband services. Google, for their part, has said they will bid $4.6B for some portion of this old 700 MHz spectrum (formerly part of the UHF TV band) if the FCC clarifies and broadens its definition of “open” to include open platforms, open services and open to third parties.

I don’t follow the politics of Verizon and AT&T versus team Google, which would offer a true insight into who may win or lose or otherwise benefit from this auction. But what is clear to me, is that this new spectrum has the potential to improve access to the internet and future internet services using the attractive properties of 700 MHz radio waves. The approaches of the two camps are very different. Current wireless carriers want to buy the spectrum, and then build out services; such as new cellular and WiMax-like services. They will call this an “open system” because anybody willing to purchase their services plan(s) is “open” to do so. Probably not exactly what most technology people equate with open systems. Google on the other hand wants the 700 MHz spectrum to be more like a nationwide “free” WiFi-like or WiMax-like platform. Google would benefit from this because so much of commerce-on-the-net touches their company.

So, why the clamor over 700 Mhz? It is all about radio physics and the ramifications they have on cost and user experience. At 700 MHz, an operator can cover at least 4X more area for the same transmit power as a 1900 MHz cell phone tower. Also very importantly, 700 MHz travels well over all types of terrain, and penetrates walls and buildings well. That is what made it a good choice for TV signals in the first place. So, the hub-bub over 700 MHz is driven by the fact that more bandwidth can be delivered for less money, and can cover longer distances with better service levels and better battery life than current higher frequency cellular services. In a large industry where operating margins are tight, 700 MHz is indeed a disruptive technology.

The horror story scenario for AT&T and Verizon as they contemplate 700 MHz and Google’s bidding is pretty interesting. Given Google’s advertising business, if you speculate a bit, Google could potentially afford to subsidize a very large portion of an entire nationwide network of high feature, internet capable, mobile phones that would probably be a step beyond the iPhone of today. Think of it like a melding of Vonage and Google using an iPhone. Google would be able to raise additional revenue from the additional online advertisements they would sell from mobile “click throughs”. I don’t have the carrier background to do the math, but it doesn’t seem outrageous to me that it is very possible that Google could charge users a flat $20 a month, all-you-can eat cellular and wireless internet service plan, offer a spectacular high featured phone – including of course Wireless USB, and transform an entire industry. 700 MHz could in fact be the Tipping Point for an entire new era in cellular and internet connectivity.

It should be a wild auction to watch. If Google buys a chunk of nationwide spectrum, it has the promise of some very exciting innovations. If the traditional carriers win out, expect more of the same – just different.

This past week Alereon achieved another industry first for UWB technology – we were the first company to introduce a UWB chipset for WiMedia and Certified Wireless USB applications that is capable of operating at any frequency band between 3.1GHz and 10.6GHz. For those of you that are highly technical, this is a remarkable feat of engineering. No company has ever produced a chip capable of covering such a broad spectrum of frequency for ANY radio standard, not just UWB. But for most people, the engineering marvel of this accomplishment isn’t nearly so meaningful as understanding how this impacts consumers. While it is probably not possible to spend as much time, energy and money as Alereon has on this chipset and still remain totally objective and unbiased on assessing the importance or meaning of this achievement, bear with me and let me try.

The motivation behind the new Alereon chipset was not the intrinsic challenge. The motivation was to simplify the effort of major PC and consumer electronics companies in their quest to provide new easy-to-use technology to their customers – the consumer. So what is the problem that such a chipset solves? In simple terms: incompatible radio frequency regulations among different countries. Consider the not so distant past, you couldn’t travel between the US, Europe, Japan and Korea and make a cell phone call on the same handset due to differences in the standards and frequencies for each country. UWB technology is in a similar situation today. The UWB regulations in the US, Europe, Japan, Korea and China have some similarities, but they are all different. At Alereon we recognized that for Certified Wireless USB and any WiMedia-based technology to be truly successful, a consumer needs to be able to take their digital camera on a trip and transfer pictures from it in every country they visit without requiring intervention or configuration on their part. We knew that PC manufacturers would like to integrate just one chipset into their products and be able to ship them to any country, knowing they will meet the regulatory requirements – thus simplifying their supply chain. We also wanted consumers in Japan and Korea to have the same user experience as consumers in the USA. We felt the user experience was particularly important because so many consumer products are designed/manufactured in Asian countries. Often new products come to market in Korea or Japan a full generation ahead of their introduction in the USA. If the user experience is highly compromised there due to regulatory constraints, it might slow the development and adoption of exciting new products for the market in the USA. Finally, we had one more objective. In the USA, homes, apartments and office buildings are generally larger and more spread out, they therefore have a much lower “density” than living spaces in China, Europe or Japan. It means that in those countries there is a need for more “channels” for device to use to avoid congestion, slower throughput and lowered battery efficiency, and thus reducing the promise, of UWB and Certified Wireless USB.

So, though the challenge was technically daunting, we designed our chipset such that consumers in Japan or Korea could fully utilize the high frequencies designated by their government’s radio regulatory bodies. Further, we did so in a fashion that gives consumers a full 17 channels to use in Japan and Korea. In practical terms, having 17 channels to use means that a device always has access to any other device it needs to connect to at the highest speed and lowest battery consumption available. Naturally, we didn’t do this because we are members of the international brotherhood of altruists. We did this because it is what our customers want, what consumers asked for, and because it is really difficult to engineer – so we differentiate ourselves from our competitors by doing it first, and by doing it well. Our advantage will of course be short lived. Competitors will move quickly to imitate us. Some will rise to the challenge. Others won’t. But the chip business is one of survival of the fittest. The strongest companies who deliver what consumers find useful at a competitive price prosper. Those that don’t – don’t.

As retail Certified Wireless USB products prepare to enter the market this summer and we truly enter the era of Life Without Wires™, ultimately the world, will in some small part have a talented group of engineers at Alereon to thank for bringing to market, and raising the bar for, the world’s first truly worldwide Certified Wireless USB chipset.