Mouse, keyboard, printers, thumb drives, and the list of devices demanding a free USB port never ends. But the cable spaghetti surrounding our wired USB hubs looks ugly, so I was happy to test two wireless alternatives: IOGear’s Wireless USB Hub & Adapter and Gefen’s four-port Wireless USB 2.0 Extender.

Both let you attach USB devices to a hub that communicates wirelessly with a receiver plugged into a USB port connected to your PC, but there the similarities end. IOGear’s kit uses the freshly minted Certified Wireless USB standard, based on ultra-wideband wireless technology that offers excellent throughput (up to 250 megabits per second) but limited range. IOGear says up to 30 feet, but based on experience, I’d recommend no more than 10 or 15 feet.

Installing the IOGear product was tricky. I couldn’t use my Vista PC at all (IOGear says that it will make Vista drivers available by soon), and after installing the software on a Windows XP system, I had to wait through driver setup for the receiver and two rounds of driver setup for the hub. Even then nothing worked until I completely disconnected and then reattached both receiver and hub. Once the connection came alive, however, the PC instantly recognized a Sony Reader and a thumb drive I had plugged into the hub.

Wi-Fi Plus USB
Gefen’s adapter and hub, in contrast, communicate by using standard, 54-mbps 802.11g Wi-Fi, so you can place them farther apart perhaps 50 to 75 feet but data transfers at much slower speeds. In the test, 59MB of files from a thumb drive took more than half an hour to get to my PC from the Gefen hub, versus only a minute or two over the IOGear setup.

The Gefen package was easier to set up: The receiver and hub form an ad hoc connection and don’t need any existing Wi-Fi network support. However, the Gefen hub never recognized my Sony Reader. Also, because the kit uses Wi-Fi, it is subject to interference from other Wi-Fi networks and nearby devices that use the same 2.4-GHz band.

I would consider the $399 Gefen only if I had a pressing need to install low bandwidth USB devices at some distance from a host PC. Th e IOGear’s $160 price is a lot more palatable, and its technology should prove particularly useful once Certified Wireless USB chips are built into PCs, eliminating the need for the dongle and a lot of extra cabling to connect devices.