Cables Unlimited Wireless USB Adapter Kit Review

One of the early players to the party, Cables Unlimited's Wireless USB Adapter Set promises the elusive cable-less connection of your USB devices. Based on Wisair Certified Wireless USB chipset and drivers, the Windows XP and Vista only two dongle adapter set is one of the most cost-effective ways to reduce USB cable clutter. But how well does it work? And is the performance and range good enough to shed those USB cables forever? Read on to find out.

Reasonable price for early adopters
Excellent range, and room-to-room connectivity is possible
Decent performance for mass storage
A viable way to wirelessly access your USB-only devices, if you must

No Mac support
Not suitable for some HIDs
No isochronous support
A few setup difficulties
Only one PC can access the devices
Devices re-enumerate if safely removed but left plugged in
Requires a hub to support multi-device access
Slow mass storage performance

About Certified Wireless USB

Wireless USB has been the holy grail for peripheral manufacturers for almost as long as USB 2.0 has been around. Since that time, the personal computing industry has been inundated with wireless technologies: Bluetooth, WiFi in all its incarnations, WiMax, 2G / EVDO / 1x / 3G / GPRS / HSDPA / etc. Most folks are accustomed to the convenience of wireless connectivity, be it at home, in the office, or traveling from country to country.

Meanwhile, USB has been firmly anchored to the PC by cables and its 5m length limitation. Although a few smaller players in the industry have had USB extenders on the market for quite some time, and they work quite well in specific applications, there has never been a mainstream solution for making USB devices accessible wirelessly, point-to-point, without some complicated bridging interface such as Ethernet in the way.

Fast forward to late 2008, and Certified Wireless USB products have started to trickle out into the market. The industry was rocked with news that WiQuest, one of the major WUSB chipset manufacturers, had shut its doors. Intel also quietly suspended investment in its five year old Ultra-Wideband research and development. Consolidation inevitably happens as new technologies mature; let's hope the latest events don't spell the end for a technology that has yet to show its full potential.

Different Applications
Cables Unlimited's Wireless USB adapter set raison d'etre is simply to allow users to free their USB devices from the cables that connect them to the PC. Whether that means locating a USB printer farther away, or stashing an external hard drive in the closet or on a shelf, this adapter set in concept makes a lot of sense for removing some cable clutter centred around the PC. Cable Unlimited's claim is that the device and PC can be now as far as 30 ft away from each other, if they are both still located in the same room.

Some fairly compelling applications come to light when you actually stop to think of how we've adapted our workflow over the years to working with a plethora of USB devices, and how the connectivity model changes when the wires no longer exist. iPods still can't sync wirelessly. Smart phones can sync over Bluetooth, but if you have a headset paired to your phone, or if you have a Bluetooth mouse or keyboard paired to your PC, you'll have to unpair and go through various gyrations of button presses and configuration in order to synchronize your data before putting everything back the way they were. USB speakers might sound a whole lot better if they could be placed in an optimal location for sound, not necessarily where the USB cable most easily reaches. All of these applications are where the Cable Unlimited Wireless USB adapter set promise a bit more freedom.

Here's an illustration how Wireless USB may work for a notebook user.

As nifty as having wireless access to your music players, storage devices, USB TV tuners and other peripherals, all of these capabilities must be evaluated within the context of industry trends as a whole. Due to the late arrival of WUSB, printer and digital camera manufacturers especially have gone far down the road of offering wireless connectivity in their products in the form of 802.11 networking. Wireless USB, for the moment, must compete against all those devices with built-in WiFi and Bluetooth. From a purely cost and system integration perspective, WUSB faces an uphill battle. The key to its success will lie in the cost of products containing low-power, integrated WUSB chipsets, and, for now, how well the technology actually works. This dongle set is admittedly a transition product - it is meant to enter the crowded market and gain acceptance before more Certified Wireless USB products, those with embedded wireless USB, hit the market.

How Does it Work
The Cables Unlimited Wireless USB adapter set comprises a pair of small plastic units with USB Type A male ports at one end. One of these units, called the "PC Adapter" plugs into a USB port of your PC. The other unit, called the "Device Adapter" looks nearly identical, and it provides a USB Type A female plug to allow you to connect a USB device (printer, scanner, hard drive, flash drive and etc.) that would normally plug directly into the PC or a hub. The Device Adapter only has one USB port, so if you want to connect more than one device, you'll need to put use a hub. After connecting the wall wart power supply for the Device Adapter, and ensuring that everything is less than 30 feet away from the PC (preferably with no walls in between), you are ready to toss your USB cables!

Each adapter has an Ultra-wideband wireless radio that allows high-speed communication between the PC adapter and device adapter. Software drivers (only for Windows XP and Vista at this point), handle all the system-level nitty-gritty like allowing the OS to recognize the wireless adapters. Featuring "UltraSpeed" technology that enhances throughput for mass storage devices, we were certainly curious to know how well it all worked, and how fast a connection the new Ultra-wideband radios would allow.