Thomas, Sorry for the original flaming response, but Belkin is using the Wisair wireless USB reference design. You can find more information at http://www.mobilehandsetdesignline.com/howto/showArticle.jhtml;jsessionid=IICSV4DUIBS2UQSNDLSCKHA?articleID=196801390 . I know that Freescale completely left the UWB business because I was Director of the Ultrawideband technology Center in Motorola Labs from 1999 until 2004, which ultimately became part of the Freescale UWB operation. Freescale’s UWB operation was completely shut down early in 2006. There was no public announcement based on the potential embarrassment associated with such a bad decision on an extremely high visibility technology. The DS-UWB technology was created by XtremeSpectrum that was subsequently acquired by Motorola and transferred to Freescale, was part of the 2006 cable free USB demo by Belkin at CES. The XSI 110 chip set (Trinity) supported REAL data rates of 70 Mbits/second at 10 meters, after accounting for protocol overhead. The Multiband OFDM solution by Wisair used in the current Belkin product may have significantly worse performance as compared to the Freescale solution, but is not as bad as the original Engadget review played it up to be. That testing by Engadget was flawed, since they did not isolate the actual MAC/PHY performance and measure the data throughput at the USB application interface layer. As you know, USB 1.x supports 12 Mbits/s, while USB2.x high speed supports UP TO 480 Mbits/s. However, almost no devices on USB 2.x systems, including high speed disk drives, actually operate close to the 480 MBit speed. They typically top out at something just over 200 Mbits, and that’s using wires! Moreover, USB has no concept of isochronous data delivery, which is necessary to get data delivered “in time” to create unbroken playback of multimedia content. There is no quality of service for data delivery, or medium bandwidth reservation in USB either! Thus, USB, whether wired or wireless, will NEVER be able to properly deliver video and audio content at the quality levels expected by both consumers and manufacturers. Note that there were no USB vendors demonstrating streaming HDTV at CES this year. However, there were several 1394 (FireWire) vendors showing FW400 and FW800 implementations that blow the doors off of any USB implementation. There was also a converged 1394 over coax, 1394 wireless and gigabit Ethernet demonstration shown by Pulse~LINK, transporting several robust streams of real 1080p HDTV content simultaneously. See http://www.cepro.com/news/editorial/16915.html#null It was very impressive, particularly compared to the WiMedia Mercedes that you were not permitted to enter! Remember also that USB is a spoke and hub network architecture, and the whole shared mess can only run as fast as the slowest member of the communication channel currently opened between peers. Frankly, the WiMedia stuff may mature in a few years, but right now it’s not ready for prime time. Even the Tzero muliband OFDM implementations streaming a single channel of unknown quality HDTV video and claiming to be WiMedia “registered,” was not WiMedia compliant because WiMedia has not completed their testing suite as of this writing. Any other questions?
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Thomas, Sorry for the original flaming response, but Belkin is using the Wisair wireless USB reference design. You can find more information at http://www.mobilehandsetdesignline.com/howto/showArticle.jhtml;jsessionid=IICSV4DUIBS2UQSNDLSCKHA?articleID=196801390 . I know that Freescale completely left the UWB business because I was Director of the Ultrawideband technology Center in Motorola Labs from 1999 until 2004, which ultimately became part of the Freescale UWB operation. Freescale’s UWB operation was completely shut down early in 2006. There was no public announcement based on the potential embarrassment associated with such a bad decision on an extremely high visibility technology. The DS-UWB technology was created by XtremeSpectrum that was subsequently acquired by Motorola and transferred to Freescale, was part of the 2006 cable free USB demo by Belkin at CES. The XSI 110 chip set (Trinity) supported REAL data rates of 70 Mbits/second at 10 meters, after accounting for protocol overhead. The Multiband OFDM solution by Wisair used in the current Belkin product may have significantly worse performance as compared to the Freescale solution, but is not as bad as the original Engadget review played it up to be. That testing by Engadget was flawed, since they did not isolate the actual MAC/PHY performance and measure the data throughput at the USB application interface layer. As you know, USB 1.x supports 12 Mbits/s, while USB2.x high speed supports UP TO 480 Mbits/s. However, almost no devices on USB 2.x systems, including high speed disk drives, actually operate close to the 480 MBit speed. They typically top out at something just over 200 Mbits, and that’s using wires! Moreover, USB has no concept of isochronous data delivery, which is necessary to get data delivered “in time” to create unbroken playback of multimedia content. There is no quality of service for data delivery, or medium bandwidth reservation in USB either! Thus, USB, whether wired or wireless, will NEVER be able to properly deliver video and audio content at the quality levels expected by both consumers and manufacturers. Note that there were no USB vendors demonstrating streaming HDTV at CES this year. However, there were several 1394 (FireWire) vendors showing FW400 and FW800 implementations that blow the doors off of any USB implementation. There was also a converged 1394 over coax, 1394 wireless and gigabit Ethernet demonstration shown by Pulse~LINK, transporting several robust streams of real 1080p HDTV content simultaneously. See http://www.cepro.com/news/editorial/16915.html#null It was very impressive, particularly compared to the WiMedia Mercedes that you were not permitted to enter! Remember also that USB is a spoke and hub network architecture, and the whole shared mess can only run as fast as the slowest member of the communication channel currently opened between peers. Frankly, the WiMedia stuff may mature in a few years, but right now it’s not ready for prime time. Even the Tzero muliband OFDM implementations streaming a single channel of unknown quality HDTV video and claiming to be WiMedia “registered,” was not WiMedia compliant because WiMedia has not completed their testing suite as of this writing. Any other questions?
Gregg,
Now that's how to comment on Engadget! I stand corrected and have updated the post. Thanks much.
Thomas