USB cabling has become common place on PCs, laptops, cell phones, MP3 players, digital cameras, printers, flash drives and external storage devices among other peripherals. Wireless USB is a purpose-built technology designed to operate at good performance for consumer and small office, home office (SOHO) environments while addressing cabling management issues. Wireless USB is based on USB 2.0 that operates at up to 480Mb/sec at distances of 3 meters or 120Mb/sec at 10 meters.
Wireless USB addresses short-distance cabling complexities as opposed to being a general purpose network like WiFi. Wireless USB has industry heavy weights behind the movement including Agere Systems Inc., Hewlett-Packard Co., Intel Corp., Microsoft Corp., NEC Corp., Philips Electronics NV and Samsung Corp. to leverage "Ultra-Wideband " (UWB) to reduce the number of radio transmitters and to reduce cost while driving up volume that are essential to meet the mass market needs.
Jeff Ravencraft of the Wireless USB industry forum and a technology strategist for Intel Corp. see's the sweet spot for Wireless USB in consumer and SOHO environments for attachment of USB-based storage, MP3, digital cameras and other peripherals. Security features of wireless USB include encryption, along with mechanisms to assure affinity between a computer and peripherals. Look for wireless USB to appear in PC, Laptop, external hard disk drive, MP3 or other peripherals over the next couple of years along with adapters to retrofit existing USB-enabled devices.
According to Rajeev Bhardwai, director of Cisco's storage product marketing, the reasons for using wireless networking transport technologies are varied and include cable management, last-mile issues or limited availability of other networking bandwidth. Bhardwai see's the flexibility of IP-based networks to support storage applications using NAS, iSCSI, and Fibre Channel over IP (FCIP) over various underlying network transports including wireless as a benefit to address different customer needs. For example, Bhardwai see's the operational flexibility of wireless storage to be deployed where a customer many not have access to dedicated fiber optic or copper electrical cabling as an example of leveraging IP-based networks for storage applications.
At wireless networking manufacturer Proxim Wireless Corp., a subsidiary of Terabeam Wireless, systems engineering manager Allen DesJardins says that there are many organizations using wireless-based technologies for storage applications , however, for security and privacy purposes most of those organizations prefer to keep what they are doing quiet.