Wireless USB - UWB

The back of a computer tends to be a messy, messy place, with cables snaking like an overturned bowl of spaghetti.
Now, the first fruits of an industry push to cut that tangle have hit the market, and while they won't be much of an immediate help, the underlying wireless technology does show some promise.

Yes, you heard right. Another wireless technology. Apparently, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth are not enough. This one is called ultra-wideband, or UWB. It's similar to Bluetooth in that it has a short range, up to about 30 feet, but it's potentially much faster -- as fast, proponents say, as the USB cables we use to connect printers, webcams and external hard drives.

You can't, however, expect to shear away a lot of cable clutter with the first general-purpose products that use UWB. These are USB (Universal Serial Bus) hubs, each of which has four ports for regular USB cables. The only "wireless" part is the connection between the wallet-sized hub and the computer, which is equipped with a UWB dongle that sticks into a USB port.
The intended use is something like this: You plug your peripherals , like the printer and your backup hard drive, into the USB hub in your office. When you use your laptop there, you insert the dongle, which connects you to the peripherals without being tethered by a USB cable.
There are probably people who would find some use in this. I'm not one of them, or at any rate, I wouldn't pay $200 to eliminate a single cable between the computer and the hub. Regular wired USB hubs cost less than $20.

The real potential here is to have UWB chips and antennas built straight into peripherals and computers. Good bye to cables, dongles and hubs! That's the long-term plan of the PC industry group that certifies USB products, and it's created a Certified Wireless USB standard to help shepherd that along.

The verdict: UWB has a long way to go to fulfill its promise of speeds comparable to USB cables. But the Belkin Wireless USB Hub was at least faster than Wi-Fi, provided a stable connection, and was easy to set up and use. It did require me to install some software on my PC. Sorry, it's for Windows XP and Vista only. Gefen Inc. is taking pre-orders for a $400 wireless USB hub that it says will work with Macintosh and Linux computers, but I wasn't able to test it.

Before we can cheer at the advent of UWB, there are more questions that need to be answered. For instance, are Certified Wireless USB gadgets from different manufacturers really going to be able to talk to each other? Is the power consumption really low enough for battery-powered gadgets? Will the transfer speeds get better?

There's also the question of whether Certified Wireless USB will be a pervasive standard. The industry group behind Bluetooth is working on creating a high-speed version of that technology, which also uses UWB. That would be a competing standard for UWB gadgets, but those products are still a couple of years away. Wi-Fi also has a lot of momentum, and is showing up in unexpected places, like cell phones.

And importantly, current UWB devices aren't legal in most countries outside the U.S., because of radio spectrum regulations. There are UWB chips in production that use other bands that are legal in most countries, but they have yet to show up in products.

Judging by the latest Belkin hub, UWB is at least a contender, and yes, we should probably get used to the thought of having another wireless technology to keep track of, alongside Wi-Fi and Bluetooth.

Non-English Domain Name Tests Set To Begin

Sample addresses in nearly a dozen languages will be added to the Internet's central directories as early as next week, paving the way for Web surfers around the world to get online without knowing any English.
At this point, the 11 domain names are meant primarily for software developers and Web site designers to test the new system, but they are the first such names entered in the 13 key domain name directories, known as root servers, after years of discussions and limited-access tests.
If the global tests go well, non-English domain names could be in use by the end of 2008.
Users outside the United States long have clamored for non-English domain-name scripts, finding restrictive the current limitation to the letters a through z, the numbers 0 through 9 and the hyphen.
It is sometimes possible to create addresses in foreign languages, but the suffix -- the ".com" part of an address -- must use English characters. So the current tests involve non-English suffixes.
The 11 suffixes now under review will read "test" in Arabic, Persian, simplified Chinese, traditional Chinese, Russian, Hindi, Greek, Korean, Yiddish, Japanese and Tamil.
They were chosen based on the online communities that have expressed the most interest in and need for non-English domains.
U.S. authorities are still reviewing the suffixes. They are expected to approve the test versions next week, and the tests will begin after that. On Oct. 15, ICANN plans to unveil mechanisms for individuals and businesses to try out the new suffixes. They will not be able to register domain names, but will be able to create Web sites and pass around non-English Web links. They will also be able to try locally popular Web browsers, beyond the major ones already tested.
Everyone in the world will essentially be invited to try to break the new system, Dam said. A 24-hour hot line is being established to allow ICANN to quickly suspend the test if any problems might disrupt other domains such as ".com" and ".uk."
The technology for the root servers themselves will not change. ICANN and the standards-setting Internet Engineering Task Force have instead developed techniques -- using a system known as Punycode -- for software to convert the non-English domains into codes using only the 37 characters now permitted.
Among major browsers, only the one from Opera Software ASA fully implements Punycode, Dam said.
Users of Microsoft Corp.'s Internet Explorer, Mozilla's Firefox and Apple Inc.'s Safari should be able to get to the Web sites, she said, but until developers finish their work, portions of the Web address may appear in English characters even after being entered in another language.
E-mail applications and Web-based mail systems ultimately will have to recognize Punycode as well. Approval of that technology is expected by year's end.