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First Bluetooth Wireless Notebook at CeBIT
Hasdi Hashim writes, "NEC Corporation is using the first generation National Semiconductor chipset in the world's first Bluetooth interoperable notebook PCs with a built-in antenna, displayed at CeBit 2000."
Cell phones have the neat ability to negotiate power with the cell tower. When the signal is too strong, perhaps enough to bleed into multiple neighboring cells, they get a packet to turn down the power a notch.
It would be a nice feature for wireless lan cards to do the same, but I don't see that feature on mine. I like the ability to select the channel hopping sequence and I use directional antennas for line of sight communication, so there could be a lot of traffic in this neighborhood.
Also, I can't wait for a Bluetooth 4 button +wheel wireless mouse. Something like a wireless version of my Logitech Mouseman+, or the silver Microsoft explorer thingy.
In fact, if anyone knows a cordless (doesn't ahve to be BT) 4 button wheel mouse that uses USB instead of serial or PS/2 please e-mail me with details...
Does anyone know of a Bluetooth product for the TRGpro? I know that Socket Communications will be producing a BT CF card, but they do WinCE drivers (ick). Are there any other companies likely to release a BT CF card soon? TIA.
The latter, only more so. If I understand it correctly, Bluetooth is meant as an standard of inexpensively and wirelessly interconnecting proximate electronic devices on an a more-or-less ad hoc (and possibly sometimes automatic) basis -- not just PCs, but also mobile phones, PDAs, etc. See the web site, especially the FAQ.
It does matter where you allocate the bandwidth in that the higher the frequency, the higher the bandwidth that it can carry. So, for a set bandwidth, you need a tighther band in the higher freq than in the lower one.
However, the power needed to push a higher frequency is higher than the lower one.
Not placing cells using a certain freq range adjacent to each other is a great way to minimize collision problems. Reminds me of a logic puzzle, where you're given x hexagons in three different colors. The object is to fill the game field with the hexagons without two of the same color touching.
-- What you do today will cost you a day of your life.
BT is not meant to be used as an ethernet connection. It is meant to be a cheap connector without wires. Wireless ethernet cards are not cheap at all. It is not like these companies have dropped BT, they have done no such thing at all. They never planned to put ethernet cards in cell phones or use BT to replace ethernet networks. I think you are missing the point of BT; it is a cheap simple plug and play wireless connector. They can't be compared. As far as support goes, will you just look at the companies backing this. BT is going to be huge and not just because its just another wireless networking solution, that is not what it is at all.
This is not quite true.
Yes, at a higher frequency, you can transmit more data.. but this also depends on the exact modulation scheme used, and the size of the band used, and the power levels involved. You can also increase the amount of data you can send by increasing power.
BlueTooth is SLOW. It's not supposed to be fast. It's not supposed to replace 802.11 wireless ethernet. It's for linking devices together.
Also, 900mhz cuts through walls like butter (that's why Cellular uses it....). 2.4Ghz sure doesn't.
Your cellphone has a range of quite a distance, through walls and everything, and operates at a much higher power.
Bluetooth has a range of 10 meters, IIRC.
Bluetooth is not for roaming around the city, and not even for wireless lan at home.
It's so your laptop can communicate with the printer across the room from you, or so your palmtop can share data with the laptop of the guy sitting on the other end of the boardroom.
It's a replacement for IRDA, in simple terms.
Okay Mr. Smart guy.
Bluetooth has nothing to do with wireless LAN stuff. NOTHING.
It's not in competition with 802.11, and it's certainly not 'already out the door'. It's JUST barely coming out.
And it has TONS of support.
The whole point is that bluetooth is a single $5 chip, that creates a 'personal area network' for about 10 meters around a device. Think palmpilot. Think printer. Think sharing data across the boardroom table WITHOUT IRDA.
Thinkg that this chip has the radio gear INSIDE it, and it's so cheap that *anything* can be enabled wirelessly.
It's not supposed to be fast. Or long range.
802.11 has not 'moved' to 11 Mbps. 802.11 covers MANY modulation schemes on different frequencies, and each has it's own speed..
Don't assert facts about things you are clueless about.
I don't know about wireless data, but I know that here in downtown Indianapolis, don't even try to make a cell phone call between 5pm and 5:30pm. Everyone leaving work tries to make calls on a network with set capacity and it just fills up. Larger cities have moved to a system called microcell. Cells made up of small, inexpensive equipment (sometimes on top of street lights), that don't have nearly the range of large cell towers, but can be deployed in large numbers. So instead of one tower with a range of 5 miles than can handle 10,000 people, you have a shoe box sized system that only serves one square block and can handle 50 people. Overall, you're in much better shape. Also, you then have massive redundancy of overlapping cells. I would imagine that wireless broadband would work the same way, starting with giant centralized systems and moving to a distributed system as more people use it. To respond to the question, I would imagine that you would be sharing bandwidth, but ideally with only a handfull of other people.
-B
NT
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The dark side is that there is little to no security whatsoever in the design. Currently "security" exists as a rotating frequency from host to host. This and the 10 meter range on the trasmission is supposed to keep listening down. I think that once enough people get these the frequency hopping routine is going to be broken as easily as the same for cell phones. However, it being an "open" architecture one could impliment their own encryption between hosts that does not currently exist.
Personally I would like to see the use of the same wireless system that the NFL uses to talk between coaches and players. They supposedly have the frequency hopping like BlueTooth, but they have some sort of encryption chip that keeps chaging between transmissions. ESPN has talked about it before and I can't find the like again. Damn.
While calling bluetooth a wireless networking technology is of course correct, it can also be misleading in a world with an exploding wireless lan market and a bunch of up-and-coming wireless communication technologies.
A better way to understand Bluetooth is to imagine it as IrDA without the line of sight requirements. Today, when I want to read my emails with my PowerBook on the go, I have to carefully balance my Nokia phone on my lap to get line of sight with the laptop. When both my phone and my laptop eventually support Bluetooth, the phone can stay in my pocket. The difference doesn't seem like much, but everyone who has used IrDA on the go must understand how cool Bluetooth is.
Marko Karppinen
No, you will be able to set up Bluetooth devices to be "parked" in piconets, the term for small ad-hoc networks formed by Bluetooth devices. You will also have the capability to change security settings so your Bluetooth device will not interact with all devices within the range.
Bluetooth output will initially be 0dbm or 20dbm, which respectively correspond to ranges of 10 and 100m. With a 10m range and power in the range of milliwatts, I doubt Bluetooth will interfere with anything else that uses the ISM band. There is quite a lot of speculation on how Bluetooth will interfere with IEEE 802.11; but nobody knows that yet; since there is no Bluetooth hardware around to test.
Oh, and please make sure to bookmark my Bluetooth site so you can visit it when I'm finally ready to launch it..
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BluetoothCentral.com
A site for everything Bluetooth. Coming soon.
Zigbee Central: A Zigbee weblog
We have been hearing for a long time about bluetooth but it is out the door along with most of the companies that said they were going to support it. It was a technology that was great to show off at Comdex, but had no real developer support behind it. Lucent, 3com, Farralon and others have all moved to the readily available 802.11 wireless Ethernet standard. Once considered an underprefomer at 1.5 Megabits per second has moved to 11 Megabits per second. Plus it is completely interoperable with other Ethernet conventions and standard networking protocols.
Network Security: It always comes down to a big guy with a gun.
Bluetooth seems like a genuine Good Thing(tm). Good marketing, good buzz, good open architecture, and a good technology.
:)
Am I missing something? Is there a dark side to Bluetooth? It seems like a wholly benevolent and wonderful thing, with no downsides, catches or dark forces controlling it.
Wow. Quick, somebody burst my bubble.
Bluetooth is a low power solution. This means that the range of transmission is relatively small. Given this, there are fewer devices close enough to each other to conflict.
Remember when wireless phones first took off? If your neighbor had the same phone, you'd step on one another, and get cross-talk and what not. Then we got into frequency bands to get around the problem. Frequency hopping addresses the issue somewhat, but it doesn't solve the problem you point out. It's the same air.
With Bluetooth, the odds of signal collision are relatively small, due to frequency hopping. What's BT's range? I can't recall.. 10 metres?
You'd have to sit on a full bus of BT enabled people for this to really become an issue.
As you point out, cell has 'almost' solved the problem. The cells provide enough spatial separation between the phones that only those phones in a particular cell are competing for bendwidth. Since those phones have the ability to choose a sub-frequency that is available in the cell, they rarely conflict. When setting up a connection to the cell tower, they jump frequencies until a clear one is found.
Bummer when your cell gets saturated though. We'll have the same problem in BT-enabled offices.
-- What you do today will cost you a day of your life.
of a wireless office/home/world bothers me a bit. Anyone who knows the first thing about EM radiation is that it WILL interact with matter. As it happens 2.4ghz is the resonant frequency of water which is why microwave ovens use it to heat up food. Lets say a 20 year old uses 2.4ghz devices his entire life, it's entirely probable that he will develope some form of cancer due to the RF he used his whole life. I think the 2.4ghz band ought to have been blocked off until sufficient testing could be done so we know exactly how reactive our neurons are to RFI. Yeah I might sound paranoid but I don't want my house or office to be a health hazard because I want to tidy up my wiring. If BLuetooth takes off stupendously most of the toys you buy will be spitting out 1mW of microwaves. That isn't terrible but you need to think in long term exposure, especially for the true geeks that would use these kind of things constantly. Don't get me wrong, I like wireless technologies but like anything else there needs to be a logical process applied to them.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
Will BlueTooth become ubiquitous?
---------The early bird gets the worm, but the second mouse gets the cheese.
I read in another article (can't remember if it was here on slashdot) a prediction that wireless would overtake wired phone lines. With this push towards everything being wireless, are there shared bandwidth limitations?
If everyone is on a wireless net connection, are we sharing one big pipe of bandwidth to communicate, like coax, or do we each have a small dedicated piece of bandwidth?
I would imagine this is a problem that has been dealt with (solved?) in cell phone technology.
802.11 is like a wireless lan. It replaces the built-in ethernet cables of your office with plugged-in base-stations. When you connect, you have to do all the same old configuration you had to do to access your lan. Although of course a smart sysadmin will do more than this, the average 802.11 system relies heavily on up-front security: you're either in or you're out, just like with a lan.
Bluetooth is like a replacement for all the other cables under your desk - the Palm cradle, the keyboard, the doohickey to connect to your digital camera, the printer cable, the cable to your external modem and the 20 foot phone cord out the back of that. It's low-power enough not to need either side plugged in, and the use-model specific interoperability profiles (comm port replacement, input device, ppp, OBEX, printer) mean that (ideally) you'll be able to walk up to an unfamiliar device and actually use it without too much set-up. Each device will enforce its own security.
It's still an open question whether BT will deliver on its promise. However, BT and 802.11 are not direct competitors. You wouldn't dream of using an 802.11 keyboard to type from across the room, just like you wouldn't dream of replacing all the ethernet cables in your office with bluetooth.
Preferential Voting: easy as 1-2-3
Bluetooth specs allow for overlapping piconets, and a member of a piconet (Bluetooth spec's terminology for an ad-hoc Bluetooth network)can also be a member of another piconet. This is called a scatternet and gives you a lot of room to grow. 8 is the maximum number of ACTIVE members in the piconet, some nodes might be parked (up to 255); and it only makes sense that you can have up to 8 active members since the capacity is about 721k anyway.
Please read this good article about Bluetooth to learn more about the technology, I'm sure it will make lots of things clear.
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BluetoothCentral.com
A site for everything Bluetooth. Coming soon.
Zigbee Central: A Zigbee weblog