It was exciting to see Belkin’s new “Cable Free™” product announcement, introducing a product that is meant to be a wireless cable extender between two USB connections and is supposed to be available in March. This announcement, interestingly enough, came out the same day that NEC announced they are sampling Certified Wireless USB MAC chips that should be available in products by June.

The logical question some members of the technical community will ask is: “What is the difference between ‘Cable Free’ and ‘Certified Wireless USB’ products? Certified Wireless USB is the name of the wireless USB technology being developed by the USB Industry Forum. This is the same group that developed USB 1.0, USB 1.1, USB 2.0 and USB On-the-Go. ‘Cable Free’ on the other hand, is a proprietary technology being developed between Freescale and one of their business partners. It essentially “tricks” a USB port and then transports the data wirelessly to a remote “cable free” unit. The current Freescale UWB chipset operates at 114 Mbps, with a likely throughput of 50 Mbps or less. This probably works just fine for an application such as a printer. However, a standard PC USB 2.0 port operates at 480 Mbps with a peak throughput of about 320 Mbps. So, don’t be surprised if you don’t get the same performance from the “Cable Free” technology as from using a cable. As the window sticker says “your mileage may vary.” In contrast, Certified Wireless USB operates at speeds up to 480 Mbps, which matches the performance of a standard USB 2.0 port.

Another logical question some may ask is: “Will a ‘Cable Free’ device be able to connect to one of the Certified Wireless USB devices when they become available in the May/June timeframe?” The answer is simple – No. In fact, if you purchase a “Cable Free” product, then later purchase a PC that comes with Certified Wireless USB technology, you can anticipate that both products will have reduced performance because they will interfere with one another. Due to the speed and the design of the Certified Wireless USB standard, the PC with Certified Wireless USB performance will hold up somewhat better than the “cable free” performance, but the fact remains that neither product will work as well in the presence of the other as it would on its own. That is why standards, such as Certified Wireless USB from the USB Implementers Forum, are created.

So, if you just want to buy the latest gizmo, then hurry up and get yourself a “Cable Free” USB cable extender when (and if) they are available in March. But if you want to use an industry standard that runs just as fast as standard USB 2.0, save your money and buy a Certified Wireless USB product three months later.

This entry was posted on Monday, January 9th, 2006 at 11:23 am and is filed under UWB, Wireless USB. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.