Slashdot Mirror
Microsoft Shuts Windows On Bluetooth Support
kilrogg points to "a story from eetimes.com
on Microsoft's refusal to include Bluetooth support in their next versions of Windows. They seem to think (as most of us) that 802.11b has a better chance of succeeding." The article cites the recent flopped Bluetooth demo at CeBIT. I'm pretty neutral on Bluetooth, but when's the last time a new technology's first big public demo was perfect?
802.11 is a wireless replacement for ethernet. Bluetooth is a replacement for short-haul cable like serial cables, wireless phones, and such. They are not in direct competition, but complement each other. 802.11 is high speed, but expensive and power-hungry, while bluetooth is short range, low speed, cheap and power efficient (an important requirement for PDA:s, phone handsets and other gadgets with a limited battery life). You wouldn't use Bluetooth as a replacement for cable networks, and you won't want to use 802.11 as a replacement for serial or parallel cable.
I don't want either 802.11 or Bluetooth, I want both -- and use them for the different things they are meant for.
/Janne
Trust the Computer. The Computer is your friend.
Microsoft isn't alone here. Several vendors are getting squirrely when it comes to Bluetooth support. 3Com had an actual products page for Bluetooth up until about a week ago. Now, the link just circles back to their home page. Intel took their Bluetooth info down somewhere before that.
I've been collecting links for Bluetooth under Linux for the last few weeks. Oddly, some of the information is going away as fast as new information is coming online. The good news, however, is that with Microsoft's latest move we will see Bluetooth for Linux support well before Bluetooth for Windows support at the kernel level. If Microsoft doesn't include support, it will be up to each individual vendor to come up with their own OS API implementation.
For people wanting to get more information on Bluetooth, there is a topsites list of links to information resources. Please, help to keep the Linux links high on the list. :)
World Beach List, my latest project.
802.11 and Bluetooth are *totally different*.
It makes me sick to see all this 'bluetooth networking'.
802.11 is for wireless lan.
Bluetooth is for simple data communications between portable devices.
SHEESH.
Bluetooth is good because it can be implemented in 1 or 2 chips, with the antennae and transmitter in the chips..... so it is *cheap* to wirelessly enable a device. That was the whole point of bluetooth.. so all these pda developers and shit could easily and cheaply make stuff communiacate.
It is in their interest, it would be a reason for users to upgrade to XP. And considering there are very few other reasons to do so, it would be a good idea to include this feature. On the other hand, bluetooth seems to be a moving target right now and I agree with MS that it would be a bad idea to include a beta product with XP (assuming they have no intention of further delaying XP). IN addition, vendors of bluetooth enabled devices might include their own drivers for bluetooth, there are even open source versions of bluetooth drivers (ok they are for linux, not for win32).
Jilles
In a way this is a good sign for Apple: they are leading again, just like the elder days of look&feel... (which might come again with XP vs. OS X)
-- Colin
From the article:
Because 802.11 uses the Internet Protocol (IP) for communications, it can rely on IP systems services in the operating system. Bluetooth, however, does not use IP, and thus must rely on application-level support for communications.
Isn't this backwards? That is to say IP over 802.11 uses 802.11 for link level and physical connectivity, and 802.11 looks at the IP packet headers as just another kind of meanignless payload? You should be able to put any kind of protocol built to be layered this way on top of 802.11, shouldn't you? In fact I have an 802.11 LAN cards in my SOHO and it appears that I can bind any protocols I want to them.
If what I learned way back in school about this stuff is correct, the issue is whether 802.11 is a good way to share the wireless medium -- in this case a piece of radio spectrum.
Somebody who understands 802.11 is welcome to correct me, but I've been told that 802.11 is basically Ethernet over radio. It seems to me that if this is true, I'd expect 802.11 to be a poor thing for ubiquitous interdevice networking. You could gin up small demonstrations that'd work great, but they just wouldn't scale. The reason why is Ethernet's Listen Before Talk method of sharing the medium. Managing wire LANs that work this was is a bit easier, because collision domains have limited numbers of devices, have limited extent, and can be easily separated. Without this ability, as the packet rate grows larger devices spend more time waiting to talk (and this is nondeterministic, to boot). As the LAN gets physically larger, the number of unavoidable collisions also increases.
Back in the late 80s when thinwire Ethernet was still common and large 10BaseT hubs were a common backbone solution (and when I was more up to date;-) a lot of people had doubts about the scalability of Ethernet over the next decade. The advent of cheap 100BaseTX and affordability of large switches with massive backplane bandwidth solved this problem for most people by keeping collision domains small and capacious.
However, if you imagine a large convention center full of bluetooth cell phones, computers, pdas, and miscellaneous peripherals, all sharing a common transmission medium, anything that worked remotely like Ethernet is going to fail: too many devices waiting to talk -- no guarantee of fair queueing -- no defined physical LAN extent.
Even leaving aside issues of cost, complexity, and power consumption, 802.11 would be a poor choice. It might work well in a SOHO or small LAN environment where there wasn't much interference from nearby wireless LANs.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
ha-ha. Instead of sarcasm, why can't we be glad to see that Microsoft finally sees to have understood that quality matters. If you look at their pages about Windows XP and even Windows 2000, there's a lot of emphasis on stability and quality. They show benchmarks showing that they are more stable etc. etc. Judging from my own experience, it's true too.. Microsoft really seems to have shifted a lot of focus to quality and stability. It may or may not be because open source and Linux etc. but it's a good thing and I for one applaud that.
Slashdot had a story on this only 1 week ago. Biggest problem at this time seems to be that a BlueTooth 'standard' has yet to be implemented (there is even talk of creating a new standard that would merge the 'standards' that are now set by the different manufacturers).
Without a single standard that everybody is willing to adhere to, the sad truth is that BlueTooth may have the same destiny as WAP. Gartner Group and others proclaimed WAP to be The-Future (tm) and the Solution-to-all-your-Problems (tm). When WAP showed teething problems, it was immediately dumped by those same people. This may also happen to BlueTooth, if industry watchers will again show to be unwilling to value the technologie to its merits, and not by just trying to find the 10 reasons why BlueTooth doesn't solve the world's problems.
As long as Microsoft (and any other company) is faced with these uncertainties (BlueTooth standards still under development + public acceptance and succes far from sure) then it's only logical that they are not prepared to pour money in this.
I have a photographic memory for numbers. I know almost a hundred of them.
Hmmm, isn't this like the one technology demonstration, given by our friend "Bill", regarding USB support for Win98?
Can anyone say "blue screen of death"?
Ron Gage - Westland, MI
I'm a softare/hardware engineer in the RF (wireless) engineering business. Primarily, I work with embedded products, so I can tell you that I'd be willing to use both 802.11 and Bluetooth. Whichever one wins out on any individual product is entirely dependent on the requirements of the product.
Power, size and price are always the driving factors when it comes to embedded products, mainly because the products are often battery operated. RF transmit power is a major concern when it comes to power consumption, but not the only concern. Processing power (and thus, what you can handle in terms of network protocols and bandwidth) is the other major concern.
Bluetooth would be great for embedded products that don't require more than 10 meters of operating distance. Also, you don't require as much processing power for Bluetooth as the transmission speeds are much lower.
802.11, on the other hand, has higher transmission speeds AND longer distance specifications. I've used 802.11 transceivers and they pretty much require you to have access to the good old 60 Hz line power we all know and love. It is also very hard to process a 12 Mbps datastream on a microcontroller that runs at any speed less than ~200 MHz (do the math). Even a custom IC or ASIC optimized for I/O processing would consume a fair amount of power processing such a datastream. Don't expect to see 802.11b on a handheld device unless it has access to line-power a significant amount of time or is a bastardized version of 802.11.
The primary factor for Bluetooth's slow industry acceptance is the price. While it doesn't operate at 12 Mbps, it is significantly fast and, with its convoluted master-slave networking protocol, requires either a ton of engineering time or expensive "blackbox" transceivers. We are ready to adopt it as soon as a customer is willing to pay the price; so far, they've liked our custom solutions instead.People will be able to use bluetooth devices with Windows regardless of the level of Microsoft support. What Microsoft has declined to do however is to positively endorse Bluetooth and encourage people to buy Bluetooth devices. That is important because it will make it harder for Bluetooth to gain mind share and hence critical mass.
Regardless of how many slashdotters bleat that the two don't compete, the fact is they do. There is absolutely nothing Bluetooth can do that WiFi/802.11b cannot. Bluetooth's advantages of a marginal cost reduction and lower power have yet to be demonstrated.
The biggest problem with Bluetooth is that it isn't ready for prime time yet. The warring camps have not come together on a common interoperable standard. They are currenlty planning to launch two incompatible variants.
The next biggest problem is that nobody can make out a coherent case for the technology. There is absolutely no reason for my laptop to talk to my cellphone (apart from downloding the address book which already works via Ird). If my laptop wants to talk to the Internet I will get it a GPRS modem. As the glut of cellular bandwidth hits the US as it hit Europe the same type of calling plans will be available - allowing pooling of subscriptions across several phones.
Same goes for my PDA which won't be talking to my cellphone because it will be my cellphone. I would much prefer a slim calculator shaped form factor for the single handheld device I carry with me. I almost always use the headset in any case.
Having redundant technologies killed off is a good thing. There is nothing worse than having a Betamax/VHS type standoff causing companies to hedge their bets, wait to deploy etc. What Microsoft has done is a good thing, they have in effect declared that they consider one technology the winner. Rather than waiting for Bluetooth to mature to the point of actually working the market is likely to focus on using 802.11b to solve their problems.
I don't want Bluetooth to continue to die a lingering death. It is time for someone to announce that they have failed, have no reasonable prospect of success and that the situation is unlikely to change in the future. Microsoft has done this, we should hope that more companies follow their lead.
Looking for an Information Security student project suggestion?
Try http://dotcrimeManifesto.com/
For someone to just base this statement with no supportive information is deadbeat. Just think of the typical comp user who doesn't understand upper level technology, and how to configure things. This notion that people are willing to accept a substandard product are misconceived. Think about the people who are moving off 56k connections to DSL, Cable, etc., they've moved because obviously their concerned with speed, so for these industry people to say, people will pay x amount of dollars when they know they're buying a substandard product... Who do they think theyy're kidding? Once people read about little quirks like this, they'll be likely to wait before diving into bluetooth, and if the problem isn't addressed fast, bluetooth will die entirely.
My two cents without going into the other issues in the article.
bluetooth free
360 degrees of Karma