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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."
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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