Cable-Free USB Demoed at CES 2006

At Freescale's booth in CES we were able to see a demo of Wireless USB's main competitor, Cable-Free USB. What we found was stunning. Below you can see a regular USB external hard drive plugged into a Cable-Free USB wireless hub, streaming video straight to the laptop.

The video was silky smooth, although the video's data rate was not even close to taxing reaching the advertised 110Mbps throughput - a rate that can be supposedly reached from 10 meters away. This is very slow compared to USB 2.0's 480Mbps throughput, although it is still more than twice as fast as 802.11g. The dongle and hub themselves operate in the 3.1GHz - 4.9GHz range, and require no special drivers or hardware to run. Read: You can use your iPod, DVD burner, scanner, etc. wirelessly on any operating system, be it Mac or PC.

The Cable-Free USB dongle and wireless hub that were being used were extremely bulky prototypes, although it has been shrinked down to a more conventional form factor by Belkin that should begin shipping in early Spring.