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When we think about USB 2.0 it makes USB 1.1/1.0 feel extremely poor by comparison, but could the same soon be said for USB 2.0 and even Wireless USB 1.0?

Intel has this week confirmed that it has finalised specs for USB 3.0 and Wireless USB 1.1. I'm not surprised by the former (it was released more than seven years ago - April 2000 to be exact) but pretty stunned at the latter.

Specs - at least theoretically - are hugely impressive too with USB 3.0 claimed to deliver data rates of up to 4.8Gbps (10x that of USB 2.0): a speed which virtually all current hard drives would struggle to match. As for WUSB 1.1, this would see a jump from 480Mbps to 1Gbps.

Of course, as I mentioned earlier, the issue with these speeds is that they are theoretical and much like wireless data rates they tend to fall a long way short of their 'potential' capabilities. For example, WUSB typically reaches around 35Mbps to 45Mbps in real world usage. Consequently it could be argued that Intel should spend more time on making these standards more efficient leaving a less baffled public rather than simply up the top end in hope of dragging up the actual performance along with it.

Moaning aside however greatly faster connectivity awaits us in Q2 2008 and with memory keys hitting an astonishing 32GB and HD content beginning to proliferate the market its announcement has wonderful timing.

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