[HN Gopher] USB 3.0* Radio Frequency Interference on 2.4 GHz Dev...
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USB 3.0* Radio Frequency Interference on 2.4 GHz Devices (2012)
Author : cyberlab
Score : 222 points
Date : 2021-03-29 17:35 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.intel.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.intel.com)
| CharlesW wrote:
| Presumably this would also be true of USB 4 and Thunderbolt 4
| (both which support USB 3.2 Gen 2x2), then?
| SAI_Peregrinus wrote:
| Possibly, but USB-C connectors are generally much better
| shielded than USB-A.
| AdmiralGinge wrote:
| Obviously this isn't going to be affecting a huge number of
| people in 2021, but if you listen to AM radio (I'm a bit of an
| anorak for Radio Caroline so I've been trying to pick that up)
| it's amazing how much interference modern devices give off. The
| monitor I bought last month absolutely wipes out 648 kHz, and
| Apple's Magic Trackpad 2 is a pretty bad offender as well.
| seanvk wrote:
| I wonder if this can also interfere with Ant+?
| meepmorp wrote:
| Same frequency band, so probably.
| FullyFunctional wrote:
| Anecdata: Amazingly, I had just minutes ago had to relocate my
| mouse's (MX Master 2S) wireless receiver because of this exact
| problem - and it's the example used!
| behnamoh wrote:
| Unfortunately Macbooks have an unresolved issue where the
| Bluetooth and Wi-Fi interfere with each other. I've tried
| Bluetooth mouses on my 2015 MBP and as soon as I turn on Wi-Fi,
| the mouse cursor becomes "jumpy" and unstable. It's so annoying
| that I switched back to wired mouses.
|
| It's crazy that the issue was reported as back as 2011, but Apple
| didn't do anything about it.
| asdff wrote:
| I notice I can get that behavior if I switch off or on the wifi
| radio and immediately move the mouse, but I don't notice
| anything otherwise.
| buffington wrote:
| I wonder if it's been fixed. I use a Bluetooth mouse with a M1
| based Macbook Air, as well as with a 2018 MBP. I haven't
| noticed any issues with WiFi or with mouse in either.
|
| I'm pretty sure I've also used that arrangement with both
| 2.4Ghz and 5Ghz Wifi connections.
| GongOfFour wrote:
| It's not just Macbook Pros, for which I've also experienced the
| same issue, but the Mac Mini M1s have flakey bluetooth as well.
| Many people are experiencing random input lag with them. It's
| boggles the mind that Apple continues to ship broken bluetooth
| implementations on their machines.
| lgierth wrote:
| Yep, lots of interference with my bluetooth headphones. On Linux
| it gets a little better if you disable the wifi driver option for
| "bluetooth coexistance" (it's named slightly differently between
| the various drivers).
|
| I don't actually use wifi, but I suppose it's got something to do
| with wifi and bluetooth being handled by the same mPCIe card.
| jmb12686 wrote:
| I have a cluster of raspberry Pis setup next to my SmartThings
| hub. I upgraded storage to use external SSDs via USB 3.0 cables.
| After that, all my ZigBee devices dropped communication with my
| hub. After some troubleshooting, I just moved my hub to a
| different room.
| aidenn0 wrote:
| Strange thing happened to me; I have a bluetooth dongle and
| headset. If I plug it into a USB3 port, it has a range of about
| 6". Fortunately my case has a pair of USB2 ports, and my MB has a
| matching header. When I wired those up, it works pretty much
| anywhere in the room. Since the BT dongle is a USB 2 device, I
| would have thought that the port would use the lower frequency
| and the EMI would be the same as a USB2 port. Not sure why it
| isn't.
| seiferteric wrote:
| All the more reason to move to optical fiber+power cable like
| they were originally planning for thunderbolt/USB3.
| Scene_Cast2 wrote:
| I remember that optical transceivers are expensive. On the flip
| side, there was optical SPDIF way back when.
| gruez wrote:
| >On the flip side, there was optical SPDIF way back when.
|
| the bitrates is also much lower for SPDIF. According to
| wikipedia it only supports uncompressed 48khz 20 bit PCM
| audio, which translates to a bandwidth of 120KB/s. I'm not
| sure when it was introduced, but wikipedia says USB 1.x was
| introduced in 1996 and had a bandwidth of up to 1.5 MB/s.
| arprocter wrote:
| That probably explains why the soundbar connected to my PC
| via optical is silent if I set the output above 48kHz
| (24-bit works though)
|
| I'm back to plugging headphones directly into the case, as
| the output from the jack on the screen was noticeably worse
| vel0city wrote:
| TOSLINK (the optical SPDIF standard) originally had a max
| bitrate of 3.1Mbit (387.5KB/s).
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TOSLINK
| wongarsu wrote:
| At 1m, the 10Gbit/s fiber cable with both transceivers is
| about 1.5x the price of a USB 3.2 cable.
|
| Of course USB wants to also support dirt cheap devices that
| don't need all that transfer speed. So you probably need to
| put the transceivers in the cable, to allow cheap devices to
| ship low-speed copper cables. Then you have problems with
| bulky cables, in addition to the bending radius challenges of
| fiber.
| morphle wrote:
| Not really, a 10 Gbps SFP+ can be had for $18. A 1 Gbps SFP
| is around $8. They continue to drop in price. With an SFP you
| can go 500 m tot 10 km, around $0,06 per meter for a pair of
| fibers.
| topspin wrote:
| You're competing with something that costs a few cents.
| $8/$18 would be more than the value of some of the devices
| were dealing with here, and you need two. This is why Intel
| has at least twice now promulgated early specifications
| based on fiber and then fell back to copper; manufacturers
| won't build the products because users won't pay the price.
|
| There isn't a good solution here. People want neato fast
| stuff and they want it cheap, small and everything else
| that precludes good RF hygiene, and no one wants regulators
| interfering. It's intractable.
| seiferteric wrote:
| Seems like a lot of cheap stuff does not need to be fast,
| so USB2 is good enough. I would like to have seen
| something like those audio aux jacks with built in
| TOSLINK inline like the old MBPs had. Maybe a USB2 port
| with an optional optical channel somehow squeezed in
| would be really neat.
| topspin wrote:
| This $19.99 USB storage device [1] has a read speed over
| 3x maximum USB2. Next year it will be $10. The year after
| it will be $5. Or some such curve. Good luck telling
| people that can't have it because you say so.
|
| Optical stuff has a curve too, but until it can compete
| with a bit of stamped metal inside a molding on price, it
| will be too expensive for USB. The market simply will not
| allow it.
|
| [1] https://www.bestbuy.com/site/pny-elite-x-fit-128gb-
| usb-3-1-f...
|
| Some problems are intractable.
| [deleted]
| seiferteric wrote:
| I know that's is currently true, but at scale can they not
| bring down the cost for these optical interfaces?
| smitty1110 wrote:
| Them main problem is that to get high bitrates over
| anything longer than 2m you probably need a glass fibre.
| And that increase the cost a lot, and makes the cables more
| fragile. Corning offers an optical USB3 cable where the
| optical converter fits in a slight-larger plug, it's not
| impossible. But most people wouldn't pay for it it when
| they don't need 50ft cables.
| mfkp wrote:
| Synology actually has an option in their routers to "Downgrade
| USB 3.0 device to reduce interference of 2.4G signal" (so I
| assume downgrading the USB 3.0 port to USB 2.0 speeds would
| decrease the interference)
| bradfa wrote:
| Yes. The interference from USB 3 connections comes due to the
| 5Gb/s data rate of the super speed transceivers causing
| interference with 2.4GHz band radio devices. If you downgrade
| to a USB 2.0 connection you effectively are disabling the 5Gb/s
| transceivers and only using the 480Mb/s data link.
| baybal2 wrote:
| Making a USB 3.0 or Thunderbolt device which doesn't kill WiFi
| when they are working together is really, really challenging, but
| still possible in practice.
|
| Things can go as extreme as covering the entire USB 3.0 lane on
| the PCB with a solid RF shield from the chip, to the connector.
|
| Things such as above preclude any chance at USB 3.0 getting into
| cheaper product niches.
|
| I once looked for a good USB 3.0 testbench laptop to test devices
| with, but found out that laptops themselves have terrible USB 3.0
| RF isolation.
|
| I went through many laptops of reputable brands, but the only
| laptop I seen where USB 3.0, and WiFi were working flawlessly was
| a very old Sony laptop from 2010.
| karteum wrote:
| I see a lot of misunderstandings in some comments : we are not
| talking here about desired RF emissions but about unwanted EMC
| emissions at harmonic frequencies which just happen to interfere
| with the regular 2.4 GHz devices.This has nothing to do with how
| much spectrum is allocated to wifi vs mobile vs whatever... Here
| it is only about EMC (and it is well known for years that USB is
| difficult with EMC and it requires a lot of care on the PCB
| design !). And USB3 is not the only product that leads to
| difficulties : there are for example a lot of debates (at least
| in Europe) now with regards to the impact of LEDs (which might
| surprise a lot of people). Another example are debates on
| Wireless Power Transfer (which are desired emissions but with
| very strong harmonics that affect sensitive radio services)
| anticristi wrote:
| Nothing beats a proper wired network with a proper wired headset.
| Let mouse and keyboard send their 10 bytes per second wirelessly.
| del_operator wrote:
| Pretty sure I encountered this on my Raspberry Pi 4 with WiFi and
| USB 3 devices. I don't have a link to the forum, but I thought I
| remembered a discussion
| del_operator wrote:
| Oh maybe it was hdmi?
|
| https://hackaday.com/2019/11/28/raspberry-pi-4-hdmi-is-jammi...
| mmcgaha wrote:
| USB Thumb drives always mess with my wirelsess mouse. The first
| time that I encountered the problem was a huge waste of time.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| harha wrote:
| I'm surprised this isn't discussed more widely (though even
| vendors know about this [0]). My wireless Logitech mouse didn't
| work properly when I had a hub connected to bring some
| connections to the front of my iMac (both with Bluetooth and the
| dongle the mouse had a significant lag).
|
| It's hard to believe that there is a standard and devices are
| widely deployed that mess so so much with their environment.
|
| [0]: https://support.logi.com/hc/en-
| us/articles/360023414273-Wire...
| function_seven wrote:
| Ran into an issue with my Home Assistant setup, using a USB
| dongle to create a Zigbee network. Had to use a USB extension
| cable to move the dongle a few feet away from the Intel NUC
| that it was connected to.
|
| When I was searching for solutions to my intermittent problems,
| I didn't believe that an extension would solve it. It just felt
| like "blowing into the NES cartridge" to me. But I kept seeing
| the same advice, so I gave it a shot and whaddyaknow? Zero
| issues afterward.
| atomicfiredoll wrote:
| My Conbee II is struggling with constant disconnecting--to
| the point that I've had to put my Home Assistant project
| aside until I can find more time. I've tried putting it on an
| extension cable after finding a stray GitHub issue advising
| so, but it was no use.
|
| I'm certainly going to be looking at the problem through a
| new lens now that I'm aware of these wider issues.
| ornornor wrote:
| FWIW, the conbee II is... not a great device. It has what
| seems to be a fundamental flaw with its USB firmware which
| makes the device reset itself at regular intervals. The
| result is that it disconnects from the host and reconnects
| (as if you pulled the actual device out of the plug)
|
| I used to run HA in a VM via qemu/libvirt and it would
| always fail because when the device reconnects its on a
| different port and the USB pass through doesn't work
| anymore.
|
| Now I'm running the HA VM on proxmox which deals with
| disconnects reconnects better for pass through devices:
| it's able to reconnect it to the vm without my
| intervention.
|
| Looking at the logs, this happens between a couple times a
| week to 10+ times a week.
|
| I tried an extension lead (which had no impact, I think
| this solves zigbee radio issues but not USB issues), using
| a powered USB hub, using a USB 2 port, a USB 3 port, three
| different machines... no dice. It really is a bug in the
| device itself. And Dresden electronics has piss poor
| support (still waiting for any answer from their email
| support six months later). The only avenue for "support" is
| via GitHub issues where other users answer but not actual
| Dresden electronics employees.
| _Anima_ wrote:
| Same deployment scenario here (home assistant on libvirt,
| usb pass through) and my Conbee 2 has been rock solid,
| with xiaomi buttons, temp probes and door sensors.
| function_seven wrote:
| You beat me to it. I have both a Conbee II and a Nortek
| HUSBZB, and the Nortek is much more reliable. Whether
| it's better hardware, or if it's the software (Home
| Assistant's ZHA), I don't know.
|
| But same experience with Dresden/deCONZ. It's flaky.
|
| Right now I have split networks while I lazily migrate
| devices away from deCONZ. So far every glitch I've
| encountered has been on the deCONZ network.
|
| Which is a shame, because I really like the software UI.
| ZHA doesn't expose as much (or not as simply). But it
| works better, and that counts for more.
| ex3ndr wrote:
| Try new Texas Instuments devboard for ZigBee - insane
| amount of power and high quality of radio. Zero problems
| after switching to new stack.
| rootusrootus wrote:
| Yeah I thought it was relatively well known. I have my Logitech
| wireless dongle on a USB extension cable just to get it away
| from the hub.
| TacoToni wrote:
| Wow, is this why i have lag on my MX Master mouse connected to
| thunderbolt dock whether im on my mac or work PC? It is
| frustratingly laggy at times.
| burke wrote:
| Yeah, if you get a little USB extension cable or one of the
| Apple USB breakout dongles and plug that into the thunderbolt
| dock/hub, and plug the RF dongle into that, the problem goes
| away.
| TacoToni wrote:
| Thank you so much! Trying this now.
| ballenf wrote:
| I miss that wired Apple keyboard with the the two USB sockets
| on the sides. Still have one but don't use it since it's
| USB-A and would need dongle plus extra cable.
| harha wrote:
| Careful that one has a bad design too: without an extension
| cable it often doesn't work. I've read it might be because
| it's not drawing enough power to switch on.
|
| Apart from that it's just amazing, better (not as flat)
| keys than the magic make it perfect to type on, the usb on
| the side makes adding a wired mouse easy (and keeps the
| dongle close for wireless). I ordered several when I heard
| they were discontinued but still in stock at my old company
| just in case.
| tachyonbeam wrote:
| Some friends seem to think I'm a luddite when I say this, but
| this is one reason why I have no wireless mice, keyboard or
| headphones. Why introduce batteries that can lose charge and
| potentially unreliable wireless connections when you can have
| a cheaper, more reliable device with a plain old USB cable?
| The same goes for wifi. I make sure my work computer is wired
| through ethernet. Why would I want to risk downtime or random
| disconnections during meetings?
| tshaddox wrote:
| > Why introduce batteries that can lose charge and
| potentially unreliable wireless connections when you can
| have a cheaper, more reliable device with a plain old USB
| cable?
|
| The answer, of course, is that you no longer have as many
| wires on your desk and in your bag. If you need very high
| reliability and fidelity, like if you're a professional
| gamer or something, or you know you're in noisy or
| otherwise troublesome environments, by all means use wired
| peripherals. I also use a wired keyboard and mouse, but
| it's only because my favorite keyboard and mouse aren't
| wireless and I haven't found great wireless alternatives.
| TacoToni wrote:
| Honestly, I've debated going back to wired. I never move my
| keyboard or mouse from my desk, so I might as well bring
| back wired peripherals.
| reader_mode wrote:
| So is this why my MX keys and mouse drop BT randomly on my MBP
| ? I noticed it was more likely when I plug in stuff like
| android phone for debugging but I thought it was a
| coincidence... so are there ways to fix this ? shielded cables
| and hubs ?
| daishi424 wrote:
| Are you using Type-C to Type-C cable with an Android phone?
| Yeah well, finding a USB2.0 cable with both Type-C ports
| might present a challenge.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| They're easy to find. Anker, amazon basics, monoprice all
| have them.
| minimaxir wrote:
| I use 3 Logitech USB wireless devices (mouse, keyboard,
| headset) for my iMac and have had zero wireless issues. It's
| weird.
| harha wrote:
| You might not have a hub. I've added one because the back usb
| and card reader were hard to reach, that is when the problems
| started. It might be the dock but I've had issues with others
| too and I don't want to order any dock I can find and test
| which ones don't interfere, especially after I did some
| research and found out it may be linked to USB 3.
| BoorishBears wrote:
| I have a hub with no issues
|
| Seeing as there is a wide range of quality for USB hubs,
| part of me wonders if this is just poorly designed ones
| worsening potential issues
| harha wrote:
| Possibly, but given that even Intel and Logitech comment
| on this issue I won't take the cost and effort of testing
| them all and reviews are often also pretty worthless.
| ohazi wrote:
| > It's hard to believe that there is a standard and devices are
| widely deployed that mess so so much with their environment.
|
| This is entirely a problem of our own making.
|
| We give cellular providers _hundreds_ of MHz of exclusive
| spectrum access, and then deprecate and auction off the old
| analog TV channels to give them hundreds more, but we expect
| everybody else to shove all of their traffic into a 100 MHz
| block at 2.4 GHz.
|
| It's not that this standard is doing anything particularly
| nasty to the environment, it's just that it happens to be
| messing with the one tiny head-of-a-pin that we've decided
| everything needs to live on.
|
| It's a _computer controlled radio_ for crying out loud, give us
| 400 MHz and let the computer figure out how to hop around.
| mrtweetyhack wrote:
| "give"??
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| > give us 400 MHz
|
| We have that, it's called 5GHz.
|
| And also 6GHz now, that allocation is 1200Mhz wide!
| harha wrote:
| 5GHz works well as long as your access point is in the same
| room.
|
| In real life one of the drivers behind having so many
| wireless devices in the first place is avoiding the effort
| and cost of laying cables everywhere, 5GHz often doesn't
| solve that problem well.
|
| For now I'm using powerline devices to connect rooms with
| their own set of problems, nothing beats having a well
| thought through wiring in the house though.
| tomc1985 wrote:
| I live in a small house in a big city and 5ghz is the
| only usable spectrum. The connection is solid through
| walls and there is a minimum of interference from
| neighbors -- I can only see my immediate neighbor's wifi,
| whereas 2.4ghz I get broadcasts from the entire block and
| can't even stream Netflix
|
| In fact the lack of range works so well that I can use
| almost the entire spectrum for various networks and not
| feel guilty
| sgtnoodle wrote:
| My house is over 100 years old with fairly thick walls,
| knob and tube wiring, and a lot of neighboring 2.4Ghz
| access points. I ended up going under the house and
| running cat6, which was no small feat considering how
| tight the crawlspace is.
|
| Of course, the cat6 cable I used subsequently got
| recalled, and so the manufacturer had to pay for a
| contractor to rerun it. They said that it was the type of
| job they wouldn't have even quoted for any price
| originally because it was so gnarly.
|
| I have 2.4Ghz and 5Ghz from two APs on either end of the
| house. I turned off support for pre-n speeds on the
| 2.4Ghz to hopefully save some bandwidth on the beacon
| frames. I have Ethernet over Power to my garage, where I
| have a third AP for our inlaw unit.
|
| The Ethernet over Power seems to be pretty good, but I
| had to find the right brand of equipment for it to not be
| flaky. WiFi still sucks, but my desktop and TV are
| hardwired, and it's good enough for mobile devices. I can
| go for about a week without losing my work VPN
| connection, through wifi through Ethernet over Power to
| PDSL.
| derefr wrote:
| In apartment buildings, there's no advantage in a
| wireless protocol that penetrates walls--quite the
| opposite. I don't want my neighbour's router and mine
| constantly shouting over each-other. I want the signal to
| end at the wall.
| harha wrote:
| I see more than 20 networks in the building I'm in, so
| that is already happening.
|
| Most people I know don't have cables going to different
| rooms, there's a router where the signal comes in and
| wifi from there. Often there's not even the choice which
| room or part of the room that is.
|
| Unless your building is relatively new and someone
| thought about setting up the cables, it can be very
| expensive to do so later.
| xraystyle wrote:
| Agreed, this would be ideal. Most people don't understand
| that literally every access point on a given channel is
| part of the same broadcast domain even if they're totally
| separate networks. Every AP that yours can see on the
| same channel slows down the network for all of them,
| because wifi is half-duplex. Everyone needs to shut up
| for a second while one host on the channel transmits.
| hctaw wrote:
| The market rate for 400 MHz is $80 billion. There's only one
| industry with enough demand and revenue to justify that
| purchase price, which is mobile.
|
| 2.4GHz may be crowded, but it's nowhere near as bad as mobile
| where the demand for bandwidth has been doubling yearly for
| two decades.
| scotty79 wrote:
| What about 5GHz wifi? How does it work?
| NovemberWhiskey wrote:
| It very much depends on which band that spectrum is in. If
| 400MHz was worth the same everywhere, it's doubtful that
| amateur radio would have >4.7GHz of it allocated on a
| primary basis in the EHF band, for example.
| lukeschlather wrote:
| This is a part of the mobile market. They're the same
| market. 5G providers have frequencies that can't travel
| through walls and don't even make sense for a long-distance
| network. Those frequencies should just be part of the Wifi
| standard.
| TaylorAlexander wrote:
| It's our spectrum to sell or not sell. No industry needs to
| "buy" public bands, we can just decide to allocate them for
| the public.
| ohazi wrote:
| The FCC's job is not to get every last penny for every last
| Hz, it's to be a good steward of the commons.
|
| There is utility in the general public being able to use
| more unlicensed spectrum at home and in the office.
|
| We can argue about what the right breakdown might be, but
| I'll start by asserting that ~3 GHz in total between
| Verizon, T-Mobile, and AT&T, vs. only 250 MHz in total for
| the _entirety_ of local, short-range wireless communication
| is absurd.
|
| On Wi-Fi, everybody just shouts at each other. On mobile,
| providers buy huge swaths of spectrum, partially as a
| monopolistic strategy to make life harder for competitors,
| and partially because they're still using cell allocation
| strategies from the '80s. They maintain exclusive rights to
| blocks that they are not using in a region, because the
| towers two cells away are using them, and it's just easier
| to use a fixed checkerboard allocation.
|
| Both Wi-Fi and 3GPP standards can and should be improved to
| make better use of temporarily unused spectrum.
|
| A good start might be to prevent carriers from having
| exclusive rights to _any_ spectrum. At least one layer of
| the cellular protocols should be standardized across
| carriers allowing towers and phones to dynamically request
| and then relinquish spectrum on an as-needed basis.
|
| Today, if 500 people in a room use T-Mobile phones, but
| Verizon owns all the spectrum, then nobody gets to use
| anything. This is stupid. Verizon should have access to a
| fraction of spectrum proportional to their users in an
| area. More users, more spectrum, and vice versa.
| NovemberWhiskey wrote:
| > _Today, if 500 people in a room use T-Mobile phones,
| but Verizon owns all the spectrum, then nobody gets to
| use anything. This is stupid. Verizon should have access
| to a fraction of spectrum proportional to their users in
| an area. More users, more spectrum, and vice versa._
|
| That would require a fairly radical departure from the
| infrastructure of the existing cellular networks,
| wouldn't it? Right now, each provider has a monopoly on a
| portion of the spectrum within a defined geographical
| area, and provides the base station and backhaul
| infrastructure to support their network.
|
| It's not like "Verizon owns all the spectrum in a room";
| it's that Verizon has better base station coverage of
| that room than T-Mobile does.
|
| The providers compete on, amongst other things, coverage
| and network performance. Sharing spectrum would
| effectively require mutualization of base station
| infrastructure. You would effectively have a single
| monopoly with the networks operating as virtual
| operators. It's very far from clear that would be a good
| outcome, to me, at least.
| flir wrote:
| > That would require a fairly radical departure from the
| infrastructure of the existing cellular networks,
| wouldn't it?
|
| I think it can be done at the legal layer - just require
| roaming agreements between providers.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| I'd rather the telephone industry spend $1 on hardware
| than see them spend $1 on license fees.
|
| The story now is "$80 billion in license fees" and "$20
| billion in hardware" and that seems the wrong way around
| -- when most folks play poker the stakes are supposed go
| up, not down.
| freeone3000 wrote:
| The money is made up! The FCC could sell spectrum for
| pennies, or give it away, or restrict access to The Right
| People, or wash their hands of it, or do another auction.
| They've done all of these things at various points. The
| license fees are made up.
| inetknght wrote:
| > _The market rate for 400 MHz is $80 billion._
|
| If market rate were justified for everything then we
| wouldn't even have space reserved for HAMs.
|
| > _There 's only one industry with enough demand and
| revenue to justify that purchase price, which is mobile._
|
| There's plenty of industries with enough demand. There's
| just no way they can compete with the money that mobile
| offers. That's a damn shame given that money shouldn't be
| the only, nor even the main, driver.
| LeifCarrotson wrote:
| I think OP was using a rather consequentialist and
| capitalist economic model, where the value of a thing is
| _by definition_ equal to the money that you can get for
| it on the open market.
| scarby2 wrote:
| Or maybe just that governments rarely pass up on that
| kind of revenue unless it's a huge PR win, in this case
| it wouldn't be very noticeable.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| There is a big block of spectrum around 5GHz for unlicensed
| use, and another huge one in the 6GHz about to be opened up.
|
| The trouble is that protocols like ZigBee and ZWave and
| Bluetooth and ANT+ are stuck in the 2.4 GHz band and
| practically you cannot turn off your 2.4 WiFi access points
| and be happy.
|
| Thus I have to go to the woods to pair my fitness band with
| the heart rate sensor because at my house who knows what is
| going on with the hue light that is on the wrong side of my
| monitor from the hue hub or the smoke detector that posts the
| battery status to SmartThings, etc.
| jpm_sd wrote:
| (2012)
|
| It also interferes with GPS and Iridium. USB3 is a broadband
| jammer.
|
| Previous thread on the subject:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24707479
| voqv wrote:
| Experienced terrible headaches trying to fix issues with GPS
| and USB3 at work. I was also surprised by how sparse
| information online was. Almost all mentions came from random
| drone hobbyist's forums when I was searching some time ago.
| pgorczak wrote:
| Same here while working on a UAV even though the GPS module
| was mounted about 20 cm away from the single board computer.
| We looked at it with a spectrum analyzer back in the lab and
| the USB 3.0 ports really sent out some wide band interference
| that covered the GPS bands. Using USB 2 cables fixed it
| (apart from USB being really not great mechanically for a
| combustion engine powered UAV).
| Badfood wrote:
| I make gps enabled cameras and am battling with RFI from
| USB3. Juat ordered a bunch of chokes to try on cables to
| mitigate. Im surprised this level of RFI is allowed. Either
| that or these devices aren't being tested properly. Like they
| are powered up for testing but aren't used with actual data
| being sent to and from them
| bradfa wrote:
| In my experience, USB connected products are EMI tested
| only with the cable shipped with the product in the box and
| used per the product instructions or in a "typical" use.
| Quite a decent amount of effort and cost is spent for some
| products to ensure that the cable which ships with the
| product will properly comply with all regulations regarding
| interference in the countries in which the product is sold.
|
| There's no way a manufacturer could be expected to EMI test
| a product in every conceivable way a customer might wish to
| use it. For many products there's simply too many
| combinations of use-cases or features. So the rules
| generally require to test in a typical customer use or by
| following the instructions for use which come with the
| product.
|
| As soon as you start using cables which didn't come with
| the product, it's on you to ensure that the emissions of
| the new cable and the product don't combine to cause
| problems.
|
| Some cables (not just USB cables) are utter crap for
| interference.
| Pokepokalypse wrote:
| "allowed" on unregulated spectrum.
| sebastos wrote:
| Yup, this is well known in the small UAS industry at this
| point, and I was part of a lab that lived through that "wtf,
| how does nobody talk about this" experience. It seems like
| many folks in the space have learned this the hard way.
| anamexis wrote:
| Are you suggesting that you got headaches from radio
| interference?
| voqv wrote:
| As others have said. I edited the post for clarity.
| neon_electro wrote:
| I think they're suggesting that they do professional work
| on/with GPS and USB3.0.
| jandrese wrote:
| I think he was speaking metaphorically about having to fix
| equipment that was interfering with neighboring equipment.
| anamexis wrote:
| Ahh, this makes more sense.
| ilogik wrote:
| your GPS device doesn't actually transmit anything
| LeoPanthera wrote:
| I believe he meant that USB 3 devices were effectively
| jamming GPS receivers.
| fortran77 wrote:
| You can fix that! Get a BladeRF, HackRF, LimeSDR, and you
| can transmit your own GPS signals:
|
| https://github.com/osqzss/gps-sdr-sim
|
| (Seriously: Don't do this unless you're taking extreme care
| not to radiate outside your lab.)
| voqv wrote:
| Yeah, it receives things.
| piannucci wrote:
| I work at a lab where this is a major nuisance.
|
| I've been wondering whether the clock spreading in the USB
| standard could be manipulated to notch out certain frequencies,
| like in noise shaping for ADCs.
| andylynch wrote:
| Learned about this recently - it seems semi notorious as a reason
| for devices like Zigbee transmitters to have soft failures.
| azinman2 wrote:
| Wonder if this could be relied on for fingerprinting,
| exfiltration, or other creative uses...
| Waterluvian wrote:
| Speaking of RF interference.
|
| For the first time I bought myself nice headphones. And for some
| reason, unlike previous headphones, I can now hear very clear
| buzzing patterns any time my phone gets a Signal message.
|
| I don't get it. It's not SMS, it's Signal messages over LTE. And
| the phone isn't connected to my headphones in any way.
|
| And it just really diminishes my enjoyment of these things.
| bentcorner wrote:
| I'm guessing your headphones are wired? Move your phone and/or
| its charging cable.
|
| If your headphones are wired into the back of a desktop, bad
| power shielding in your desktop itself can cause similar
| problems. An external dac can isolate your headphones from your
| desktop.
| Waterluvian wrote:
| Oh you know what, I think you just helped me realise what
| might be the culprit. The cable in these headphones is like 8
| feet longer than my cheap-o-phones and so I've run it around
| the back and to the side of my desk and the back out front.
|
| As a result I probably changed how my headphone cable behaves
| as an antenna compared to the shorter cable that went
| straight from laptop to my ears.
| sp332 wrote:
| I can't tell you how to fix it, but it is pretty common. You
| can put your phone on top of a speaker and hear some clicking a
| couple of seconds before you get a phone call for example.
| jandrese wrote:
| I used to get terrible GSM buzz on my speakers, but that was
| many years ago. Since switching to LTE I've not noticed it.
| dewey wrote:
| This is also the main reason why I'm switching everything back to
| cables. I can barely use my bluetooth headphones in my flat just
| because I'm using a USB 3 hub. Headphones randomly disconnecting
| in video calls is not a great experience.
|
| Related: https://annoying.technology/posts/08834ce6ea3edc5a/
| munk-a wrote:
| The depletion of ports on computers and forced migration to
| dongles is a trend I am absolutely baffled by. Whenever I'm
| given the chance I will always go for a laptop with an Ethernet
| port and as many USB ports as possible - even if that results
| in a thicker profile. Weight is something I care moderately
| about, thinness is something that has zero value for me since
| we passed the inch and a half threshold.
|
| I also, personally, have a strong preference for USB Type A
| connectors over the Type C and Micro variants, cable stability
| and port wear is noticeably lessened with the larger cable
| seating.
| creaturemachine wrote:
| It doesn't help that the dongles we end up buying are the
| cheapest off-brand trash available on Amazon. No wonder they
| leak RF like a garden hose.
| bmcahren wrote:
| You're biased then or buying equipment not to spec.
|
| USB-C ports are supposed to be 6X more durable tested to
| 10,000 connections vs 1,500 for USB-A.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USB_hardware
| https://www.anandtech.com/show/8377/usb-typec-connector-
| spec...
|
| I've personally noticed the USB-C is much more durable.
| Something about the cage of the USB-A catching and bending
| more easily.
| asdff wrote:
| I think there is a bias now due to the higher usage with
| USB-C vs old USB. It used to be you'd either connect
| something to USB temporarily, like a flash card then back
| into your pocket after the file transfer, or permanently,
| like a USB mouse in the back of your desktop you never
| unplug again.
|
| Now that the port is becoming a charging port, it's used a
| lot more than data-only USB, and in ways that torque the
| port worse. You plug your usb phone into a usb brick and it
| largely isn't going anywhere, but on a laptop, you are
| plugging and unplugging the device all the time. You might
| be leaning at angles with it on your lap and adding
| pressure on the port (something I inadvertently notice
| myself doing once a week). On top of that, the go bad part,
| the flimsy inner pin, is on the computer side rather than
| the cheap cable side. After a year of use, my usb-c port
| went from snick snick to wobbly, both on my macbook and my
| nintendo switch.
|
| In contrast, I've never had this happen with lightning port
| on my iPhone despite all the abuse and lint I give it,
| because the design is inverted with the flimsy pin on the
| cable being inserted into a simple slot in the phone. The
| old macbook magsafe plug was just a magnet holding contacts
| firm against each other, not even inserted into anything,
| so if it got torqued or abused it would just pop off and
| there would be no harm to the computer or the plug really,
| and you spent no force or effort jamming it into the
| computer since the magnet did the alignment work and made
| the connection for you (Typically, I would just grab my
| magsafe cable a foot up from the end and loosely slap it
| against the port basically and it would seat itself).
|
| With the shortcomings of the design of USB-C, in comparison
| to the older standards, you put on a lot more wear and tear
| on the port.
| ethbr0 wrote:
| I found my MBP ports started getting dicey after a couple
| years. In that vertical deflection and jiggling was
| necessary to get a good connection.
|
| This was with ~5-10 plug ins a day, 5 days a week, for ~2.5
| years. So around 3-6k connections.
| aidenn0 wrote:
| I've never had a USB-A port die on a motherboard, but I
| seem to break USB-A ports on cases, and always the same
| way. The plastic support for the pins that also acts as
| keying breaks. Probably just that I tend to buy cheap
| cases.
|
| Only port I've broken on my laptop is HDMI. Fortunately it
| has a thunderbolt port as well for video, but now I need a
| dongle.
| harha wrote:
| Cables have another advantage: it's much easier to switch
| devices, just plug it in, no more connecting and disconnecting
| and figuring out how that specific device has implemented
| pairing.
| dewey wrote:
| At least the headphones I'm using Bose QC 35 can connect to 3
| devices at the same time. If it's nicely supported it's not
| really an issue but as soon as I step away a few meters from
| the computer the connection starts to drop I'm better off
| with cables.
|
| Kinda odd that you even have to think about basic features
| like that these days.
| wongarsu wrote:
| My Sony WH-1000XM4 only connects to 2 devices at once.
| That's mildly annoying since I would like to connect it to
| 4 (Phone, Tablet, Laptop, Desktop). It stays paired just
| fine, but I have to regularly go to the bluetooth settings
| of the device I want to listen to and press connect. On all
| but one of those devices that's more work than replugging a
| cable.
| dijit wrote:
| Also using Bose QC 35's, and only _today_ (oddly enough) I
| was getting incredibly annoyed at them for connecting to my
| phone and laptop (MacBook, in sleep mode, fwiw) and _not_
| the Linux machine I had in front of me which was the "first
| profile" (the one that the device speaks about when
| powering on, "connecting to... <device name>")
|
| It seems mine can only be connected to two devices, and
| gets a bit weird when the secondary device wants to make
| sound but the primary device is already making sounds.
|
| I have missed calls because of that.
| kzrdude wrote:
| And no more computers fighting about who's going to have the
| mouse.
|
| And I found my Rpi using 50% cpu being stuck connecting by
| bluetooth to the digital piano.. for no reason. :)
| ChuckMcM wrote:
| Ah yes, the Logitech fiasco. It is a great story of how several
| electrical engineers designing separately, and not understanding
| software impacts, could make a sub-optimal result.
|
| The big takeaway is that at 5GHz signals often "leap off the
| conductors" at the slightest provocation. And clock skewing and
| other attempts at breaking data/signal correlation have limited
| ability to counter this.
|
| For a long time I had a USB 2.0 cable extender with an RF choke
| on it, that I would connect to USB 3.x hubs and then plug the
| Logitech transceiver into that.
| newhouseb wrote:
| I recently built a Bluetooth transmitter that can advertise by
| transmitting binary bits at 5gbps, which has essentially the same
| physical characteristics as USB 3.0 [1]. Whereas I used an FPGA,
| I wonder if one could intermingle the right bits amidst the rest
| of the USB 3.0 protocol to build a bluetooth transmitter...
|
| It's not surprising but still insane that so many USB cables
| aren't properly shielded, thus making all of the FCC's efforts
| regulating devices effectively useless as your USB cable turns
| into an antenna to transmit garbage.
|
| [1] https://twitter.com/newhouseb/status/1352796299700162560
| (note this is running at 6ghz, but also works at 5ghz w/ more
| noise)
| cat199 wrote:
| Thank you intel. Had to wrap the cable for my my iogear 3 port
| USB-C hub in a electrostatic bag to keep it from breaking wifi on
| my butterfly macbook pro for just this reason.
| yummypaint wrote:
| I have had USB 3.0 devices cause noise which gets picked up by
| silicon strip detectors in particle physics experiments. These
| days its common to have a computer in the target room next to the
| digitizers to avoid long analog cable runs. Now you have to be
| careful which USB port you plug into with what device.
| hilbert42 wrote:
| One of the problems is the many shitty USB cables about in the
| wild. The screening on many of them is pathetically inadequate.
| Not only do these cables emit noise from the USB electronics
| but also the USB equipment to which they are connected becomes
| susceptible to noise from external sources.
|
| On more than one occasion I've had external USB drives lose
| their MFT (Master File Table) data as a write update was
| corrupted by noise. Essentially, the external noise killed the
| data on the disk.
|
| Often, when one pulls these USB cables apart one can see the
| shielding coverage is 30% or less.
| harha wrote:
| Have you tried putting a Raspberry Pi 3 (without the USB 3.0)
| in between and sending the signals over Ethernet?
| yummypaint wrote:
| We have historically avoided using PIs for critical things
| because of innevitable memory card corruption after a few
| years. Now that there are means to boot from other storage
| media that might change. What i would really like is a BIOS
| option to kill 3.0 capability.
| harha wrote:
| Only model 4 has USB3 (and that one comes with two ports
| that only have USB2), in case you don't need the higher
| performance.
| Lucasoato wrote:
| Have you tried wrapping everything with lead?
| ben509 wrote:
| It's going to be a PITA when USB 832.1 comes out and we need
| a light-year of lead to deal with neutrino interference.
| yummypaint wrote:
| We do make liberal use of lead in general, but in this case
| the noise is electrical in nature. The detectors we use tend
| to behave like radio antennas and so they are well shielded
| electrically. I suspect the mechanism is the USB 3 making
| extremely sharp transients that make their way into
| preamplifiers via the power supplies. It's a slippery thing
| to track down, though.
| nimbius wrote:
| unrelated but interesting, certain resolutions of HDMI on the RPi
| will interfere with the 2.4ghz transciever, effectively jamming
| it.
|
| 2.4ghz is like the duct tape of the electromagnetic
| spectrum...everything runs there.
| soneil wrote:
| It amuses me that the whole reason 2.4GHz exists as an ISM
| band, is that the band was too noisy to make use of.
|
| Basically microwave ovens came before the ISM band. 2.4GHz is
| the sweet spot for heating water with microwaves - there's a
| few frequencies that work, but too high is expensive and
| difficult to shield, too low requires more power to get the
| same results.
|
| So this band was effectively "written off" by the ITU/FCC as
| being too noisy to commercialise. The result is a band where
| you can do almost anything you want, as long as you emit less
| power than a microwave oven does. This makes it ideal for
| local-range applications that don't want to deal with the
| licensing requirements of 'real' bands - as long as they don't
| mind sharing it with microwaves. It's the typical story of a
| lightly-regulated free-for-all.
|
| 2.4GHz isn't a mess because everything uses it - everything
| uses it because it's a mess.
| garaetjjte wrote:
| It happens the other way too. I once wasted few hours debugging
| why 4K mode wasn't working on some Mini-PC computer. Turned out
| that the cause was plugged mouse transceiver into USB port
| adjacent to HDMI...
| spicybright wrote:
| USB3 seems like such a sh*t storm.
|
| Too many features, no standardized labeling for what cables
| support, not truly reversible connectors, dongles and hubs that
| barely work unless you drop hundreds, etc.
|
| I'm hoping to god we learn for USB4.
| est31 wrote:
| > not truly reversible connectors
|
| What do you mean by that? USB-C connectors are not truly
| reversible? USB3 can also exist in USB-A and B variants that
| are indeed non reversible.
| tech2 wrote:
| Because of how the connector is laid out, it's possible for
| devices to not work (or to work differently) depending which
| way up you plug it in:
| https://twitter.com/mifune/status/1373564866443759617
| est31 wrote:
| Oh that, I remember seeing the video. Are there any real
| world devices that have problems depending on the
| orientation though? This one is just a demo meant to
| demonstrate that if you really want to, you could make
| usb-c dependent on the orientation.
| toast0 wrote:
| I've got a Nexus 5x that now only charges if my USB A ->
| C cables are oriented properly. When it was new, it would
| charge in both directions as expected.
| Black101 wrote:
| a round connector that can be inserted in any orientation
| would be ideal... we can only dream
| InitialLastName wrote:
| It's way past time for USB over TRRS.
| jaywalk wrote:
| That would require a pretty long connector and a
| correspondingly deep port.
| Black101 wrote:
| why would it need to be longer then a current USB
| connector?
| jayd16 wrote:
| I don't think you can just take the current design and
| "make it round." You can't just put pins on a cylinder.
| They wouldn't align as you rotated the connector. The
| other way to do it would be co-axially like a headphone
| jack...but those are deep.
| toast0 wrote:
| We could use 2.5mm headphone jacks. TRRS would be enough
| pins for USB 2. Just need marketing to convince people
| that slower and less interference is good and valorous.
| Cu3PO42 wrote:
| USB 4 is essentially Thunderbolt 3. It transports either USB
| 3(.2), PCIe, or DisplayPort in one of two variants.
|
| Support for these features is still mostly optional. The only
| real upgrade is that -- as far as I can tell -- USB4 requires
| host devices to support DisplayPort. It's still a USB-C
| connector, so I don't see the cabling situation improving.
| random5634 wrote:
| Lightning
| meepmorp wrote:
| Come on, USB 3 was just gustier winds in the Giant Red Eye of
| shitstorms that is USB. USB 4 will innovate only in respect to
| how it manages to deliver new dimensions of incompatibility.
| mikestew wrote:
| _I 'm hoping to god we learn for USB4._
|
| If one looks at how well Bluetooth finally got straightened out
| after version 5, I think we have good reason to hope!
| cactus2093 wrote:
| How many variants of features are there really in practice for
| cables? Particularly for "brand name" cables from Anker, Amazon
| Basics, etc?
|
| I've only ever noticed Thunderbolt (which I've always seen
| denoted by a lightning bolt) and USB-C. And never really had a
| compatibility issue outside of that.
|
| One issue I have noticed is that there are dozens of 5 and 7
| port USB A hubs out there, but there are basically no 5 or 7
| port USB-C hubs. Lots of multi-purpose hubs with SD slot,
| multiple USB-A ports, and maybe 2 or 3 usb-c ports. And those
| USB-C ports will often have higher output via power delivery
| protocol, so obviously there's a thermal limit to how many of
| those you can pack onto a small hub. But why are there no non-
| power delivery simple usb-c hubs that would be a drop-in
| replacement for USB A hubs? It seems like this is kind of an
| issue for more simple peripheries to switch over to USB-C.
| [deleted]
| Kenji wrote:
| This is well-known. You have to live behind the moon to not know
| this in 2021. USB 3.0 absolutely destroys WiFi and Bluetooth
| connections.
| alexfromapex wrote:
| Had this problem on my raspberry Pis with external SSDs
| NDizzle wrote:
| Yep! I have a Jabra headset and I picked up a fancy newish Razer
| mouse that uses 2.4. Very odd system interrupt behavior slows the
| whole system down. I changed the mouse over to bluetooth and the
| problem goes away. It's not as EXXXXXXTREME as using 2.4 on the
| mouse, but hey - the system isn't so laggy now.
| bradstewart wrote:
| Interesting. I ended going back to 2.4 on my mouse as I'd have
| all sorts of problems with a Bluetooth keyboard, mouse, and
| headset connected simultaneously (on a Macbook Pro).
| reaperducer wrote:
| _I ended going back to 2.4 on my mouse as I 'd have all sorts
| of problems with a Bluetooth keyboard, mouse, and headset
| connected simultaneously (on a Macbook Pro)._
|
| I had a similar problem, and it turned out, I think, to be
| Bluetooth congestion.
|
| I was in an office that was partially a call center, so lots
| of people on Bluetooth headsets. Plus all their mice and
| trackpads. Plus their keyboards. Plus regular headphones.
| Plus plus plus.
|
| My desk faced out the window onto a public street. Very
| often, when a group of people would walk by my window,
| presumably each with his own Bluetooth devices my trackpad
| would disconnect from the MacBook.
|
| The solution was to keep the trackpad plugged into the
| machine, since I never took either anywhere anyway.
| bradstewart wrote:
| I've been seeing the mouse/keyboard issue at home, mostly.
|
| But I'm reasonably sure I've also experienced the Bluetooth
| congestion issue in a different context. I have an old,
| mediocre Bluetooth head unit in my car, and it disconnects
| from my phone ~90% of the time I drive in traffic. Works
| flawlessly on back roads and the like.
| gardaani wrote:
| When I connect my external SSD to my MacBook, wifi dies because
| it operates at 2.4 GHz. I fix it by placing a metal plate (such
| as a mobile phone) over the wire between MacBook and SSD. It also
| helps to switch from the left side USB port to the right side USB
| port.
| williesleg wrote:
| It's all about the bass
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