Comment by zackmorris
2 years ago
I always wanted "wireless wires" that would look like two usb/ethernet/hdmi/etc dongles and just provide one or more connection types at a desired bandwidth, regardless of protocol. They'd be encrypted by a private key set by touching them together, or installing one file of random bytes and arbitrary size to each as a usb drive (either as a separate usb plug or a physical switch that enables storage mode).
So users could plug one into their computer and the other into a drive/router/television/etc and it would "just work" without having to fiddle with 802.11 setup friction. I wonder if DECT-2020 New Radio (NR) could be used for this?
I wanted to invent this in the early 2000s when I first saw wireless usb over wifi and thought "well that's terrible", akin to the disbelief I felt in the '90s when I saw that usb connectors were flat instead of circular and couldn't believe that someone would come up with something so ridiculously annoying. But after 20 years of something so obvious not being invented (probably due to monopoly/regulatory effects), along with the hundreds of other things I wanted to invent in another life, I can comfortably release this idea into the public domain.
The bandwidth of DECT-2020 NR is 80 Mbps. It wouldn't be useful for any of those except for USB2. HDMI is high enough bandwidth that it can't be done over Wifi and needs to use 60GHz radios. What would be useful is light-based networkig, Lifi, which can do Gbps within one room.
One problem with "everything" radio dongles is that different protocols have different requirements. In particular, how they handle errors and latency. Ethernet doesn't retry but could handle latency from low-level or high-level retries. Wifi does retries cause it works better than IP level. HDMI is streaming with errors or latency from errors causing visible artifacts.
This TV station guy packs 4K video transmission on 18 Mbps RF channel [1].
Mind you most of networking high bandwidth real-time transfer and processing is just another low bandwidth batch processing accumulation.
Personally I am working on a new robust and low latency wireless PHY based on polarization that can work even with non line of sight (NLoS) that perhaps can do away with retries, but we shall see.
[1]TV Station Launches Multiple 4K Broadcasts OTA on ATSC 1.0 [video]:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39727651
These are kind of two different things though. The challenges of encapsulating a wire protocol to display video like HDMI and using a protocol like ATSC 1.0, which has support for subchannels that send effectively arbitrary bitstreams that in the case you linked, happens to be fragmented h.264/h.265 that the TV already has codec support for. 80 mbit for sub-ms latency, lossless encoded HDMI is a non-starter. 80 mbit for sub-200ms lossy encoded video streams? Yeah, let do 100.
1 reply →
Hmm ya good points.
Well maybe "fiberless fiber optics" where each end would have a plugin for an arbitrary length of fiber optic cable, normally about 10 feet long, that would run up to the ceiling and optionally exit a lens to talk to the other end through open air, with maybe a range of 100+ meters or something. If someone could make one for under $100 that could handle 10K HDMI/100 Gbps, I'd buy it. Ideally with radio fallback on something like NR for partial functionality if the view gets blocked. I want something that "just works".
Thinking about this further, I'd like to see a resilient fiber optic standard with a 180 or 360 degree fisheye lens where bandwidth falls off by angle of alignment. So light bouncing off the walls might give 1 Mb/sec, but direct line of sight would give Gbps to Tbps speed.
It's 2024 for crying out loud. I'd like to see some of these trillion dollar tech companies actually innovate for once instead of milking decades-old technologies and sucking up all the available capital to keep us delivering fast food instead of inventing this stuff in our parents' basement like in the late 1900s when people had any leisure time or disposable income at all.
So do it, mister ideas guy.