The Future of the USB

9th January 2008, 02:01 pm

One of the hallmarks of the modern age is the exponential growth in technological progress. A perfect example of this phenomena can be found in the rapid evolution of USB (Universal Serial Bus). The first USB standard, brought to market by Intel, Microsoft, Phillips and others in 1995, featured a theoretical maximum speed of 12mbs per second .¹ As you’ll see, the technology has some remarkable capablities in store for us in the future in the further advances of wireless USB and the highly anticipated high speed USB 3.0.

Wireless USB

The main advantage of wireless USB is that… wait for it… you don’t need wires! Wireless USB is a tangent of the ultrawideband (UWB) technology that was developed by the military in the early 1960s.² UWB just so happens to feature the same 480 Mbps transfer rates of USB 2.0. Currently, WUSB can be used as a replacement for your printer cable, MP3 connector, etc. As the technology and bandwidth improves, we’ll be able to stream large amounts of data like HD video files. The downsides of the technology are that the operational range, without additional range extending technology, is about 10 meters and the current maximum data transfer speed is only 480Mps.³

So what about 802.11a/b/g and Bluetooth 2.0? Well, both of these technologies have advantages and disadvantages over wireless USB. For example, the 802.11a/b/g standards have a lower theoretical maximum transfer speed, only 54 Mbit/s, but have a range of 100 meters!⁴ Bluetooth technology has an extremely bottlenecked data pipe with speeds of only 3 Mbit/s.⁵ However, Bluetooth has such low power requirements that it is extremely easy and convenient to for manufacturers to include in their devices. That is why you see it in battery operated devices such as cellphones and mp3 players.

USB 3.0

Wireless technology is always just a little bit behind innovations driven by good old fashioned wires. This is certainly the case with the brand spanking new USB 3.0 standard that was just released late last year. USB 3.0 features massively increased data bandwidth and much lower power consumption. The new USB standard features speeds of up to 4.8 Gbit/s!⁶ That is about 10 times as fast as USB 2.0. The advantages to such a high data throughput are being able to quickly transfer large files like videos to your external devices, or to better operate specific data hungry devices like external video or audio editors. Unfortunately, USB has long been known as a CPU hungry monster. It isn’t quite clear yet how the USB 3.0 specifications will combat this problem.⁷ One could imagine that if USB 2.0 is a CPU hog, USB 3.0 could be much worse. Hopefully this will get sorted out before the first products come to market later this year.

USB 3.0 isn’t the only game in town for high speed wired data transfer protocols. There is still Apple’s Firewire, which features transfer speeds of up to 800 Mbit/s, and the relatively obscure eSATA II interface which features speeds of up to 3Gbits/s.⁸ Firewire is a pretty niche interface reserved for external hard drives, video equipment, and audio interfaces. As for eSATA, the only practical application remains external hard drives. One doesn’t find many Firewire or eSATA memory card readers. If you find any let us know!

USB is the de facto standard in external data and power transfer. With the exciting improvements in wireless USB and the awesome specifications of USB 3.0, good ole’ USB looks poised to remain king of the hill. I don’t know about you, but I can’t wait for the wireless, super fast, USB 3.0 powered desktop keggerator.