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Will 802.11 Kill Bluetooth?
joshwa writes "NYTimes (free reg. required) has an article about the struggles of the Bluetooth folks to fine-tune their technology and get the costs down far enough. The most interesting part is that analysts seem to think that 802.11's (what is this new 'Wi-Fi' moniker?) growing popularity will overshadow Bluetooth's entrance into the marketplace, and will beat Bluetooth into the small devices market. Can 802.11 actually work in a Palm or a cell phone?" The article, IMHO, misses the difference in uses - if you've got a small device that you want to conserve power on, and only communicate small distances, Bluetooth's ideal. If you've got a lot of power, a la a notebook computer, and want to communicate 150 ft., then 802.11 is what you want. Imagine that: Different uses! Different standards! Amazing!
I work in the wireless industry myself, and can say that there is quite a bit of debate over this.
What will probably happen (as seems to happen a lot) is that one major vendor or provider will choose a certain standard, regardless of its value, or without a thought as to whether or not two technologies can be mutually compatible (as the writer above mentions). Then its time to push it down everyone's throats until the other one disappears.
Sad, but true.
"Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it." -- Donald Knuth
... then all you have to do is own a Handspring. There is a module to do that from Xircom (Intel)
the article is actually at http://archives.nytimes.com/2001/08/20/technology/ ebusiness/20BLUE.html
funny munging
After this story on EE Times, perhaps the tide will shift a bit?
"Cipher attack delivers heavy blow to WLAN security - A new report dashes any remaining illusions that 802.11-based (Wi-Fi) wireless local-area networks are in any way secure"
EE Times Article.
Hmm, the attack scales linearly with number of bits. Bummer.
Yawn, run ssh to secure your wireless connection and stop complaining.
Actually, we're better off using the same standard for different uses, wherever possible. Do you want to go back to TCP/IP, IPX, and NetBEUI on every LAN? Ethernet and token ring? They all have different uses, but they're close enough that we should just pick one pretending that it will work in all situations, then make the best of it.
Bluetooth and 802.11 are clearly in this situation, IMO. The main difference between them: one is for near and one for far. This makes sense by strict engineering standards, but in the big picture it's a detail. If 802.11 becomes the standard, we'll make it scale down to "near". Not to mention (as did another poster), what do I do if I'm "in between"? There are other parts to Bluetooth, but nothing that can't be layered on top of another network (in the Internet tradition of "dumb network, smart endpoints").
The evaluation of an action as 'practical' . . . depends on what it is that one wishes to practice.
802.11b doesn't do frequency hopping, it does direct sequence. That's why Bluetooth interferes with 802.11b but not vice versa. Bluetooth hops on and off the 802.11b spectrum and only suffers minimal packet loss. However, if the Bluetooth signal is strong enough it can cause the 802.11b link to drop completely.
I'm not sure what the original poster meant about access points understanding both protocols. Last I heard the two ideas under discussion were to modify Bluetooth's hopping protocol and/or regulating Bluetooth signal strength. Both of those are Bluetooth changes and have nothing to do with access points "understanding" both protocols.
What has been cracked is the WEP encryption standard, which was supposed to "provide privacy similar to that of a wire" but failed miserably due to a flawed protocol and weaknesses in the key scheduling algorithm used for the RC4 implimentation.
If you didn't use WEP then all your traffic was in the clear anyway.
My esteemed Slashdot colleagues have already pointed out that 802.11b can have verious modes, from 1 to 11mbps. But there also is no standard for 802.11b radio output power. You can have a 100mW radio like the Cisco Aironet LCM352, or you can have a 30mW radio like the Lucent Orinoco Silver. You could have 1W or 1mW, as well. I suspect that if your range requirement is only 10 meters, you could use a 5mW radio and a short dipole antenna at 1mbps for a low-power 802.11b device. If you could get 1 or 2 dBi gain out of the antenna, you'd be doing even better.
802.15 and 802.11 have very different purposes. 802.11 is designed from the ground up to be "wireless ethernet" while 802.15 is really a replacement for IR ports and for wire replacement. For instance, 802.15 has an SDP, a Service Discovery Protocol, which is basically a way do discover what the other bluetooth devices in your piconet can do. The original idea was for you to press the "Print" button and your bluetooth device goes out and asks who can handle something called a "print job". The local BT enabled printer pipes up and they negotiate automatically (The 802.15 spec also has provisions for authentication and encryption), and your print job automagically appears on the printer. To do this with 802.11, you would have to make some sort of Service Discovery layer on top of the 802.11 standard, and most 802.11 devices wouldn't support it. Bluetooth devices also draw much less power than 802.11 devices in general, and the 802.15 spec even has provisions for cutting down on your tx power if you are close enough to the piconet master (although I don't think most devices implement this yet).
In a nutshell this article is the equivlent of saying that Ethernet is going to kill off USB, because it's obviously so much faster and stuff.
I read the internet for the articles.
There were just too many threads I wanted to reply to, so I figured I'd just put everything I had to say in one post, so here goes:
1. The statement that Bluetooth is lower power than 802.11 is currently false. Okay, it has a lower power transmitter, yes, but so far, last I knew, nobody had produced a Bluetooth radio that wasn't at least as much of a power hog as an 802.11 radio... and any 802.11 radio that has a power-saving mode does _much_ better than a Bluetooth radio. Bluetooth was also supposed to be cheaper, but the manufacturers are discovering that they are having a tough time bringing down the cost on that, too. Given time, these problems can be overcome, however, 802.11 happens to have a large headstart on both the cost and power fronts, and therefore has a good chance of preventing Bluetooth from being able to compete (nobody wants to invest a bunch of resources into a standard that the market hasn't yet truly clamored for).
2. Bluetooth and 802.11b interoperability. Without breaking one standard or the other, it ain't going to happen. And even if you do break one standard, it won't be backwards compatible. The two standards conflict too much. 802.11b has a back-off mechanism. Bluetooth doesn't. I actually did some work looking into building a Bluetooth/802.11b AP that would try to cleanly give both Bluetooth and 802.11b time on the air without breaking either standard. It's too difficult. Bluetooth is just to strict on the timing (not to mention the big problem that some Bluetooth cards refuse to give up being the Master).
3. 802.11 security was not broken. WEP was broken. Badly. But WEP is not the end-all, be-all of security. And yes, the industry _is_ working on better security, and has been for some time. IEEE 802.11 Task Group e is still in the process of agreeing upon a method for point-to-point security, with dynamically session keys, including a username/password setup. This is what the industry has wanted for some time. WEP was only meant to slow down the script kiddies who would just sit in parking lots with their cards set to associate to "ANY". I really wish people would stop assuming that WEP is the entirety of wireless security. It is not, and was never intended to be. One more note on this: it was not 802.11x that was broken. I'm not sure what 802.11x is, but it isn't a security standard. 802.1x is a LAN security standard, but even that isn't what was broken. Just WEP.
4. 802.11, 802.11a, 802.11b, 802.11. 802.11 is the general IEEE group for Wireless LAN networking. 802.11b is the 11Mbps standard. 802.11a is the 5GHz 54Mbps standard (once they decide exactly what that standard is). TGe, which should translate to 802.11e will be the new security standard. There are others (including a standard for 22Mbps in the 2.4GHz band, which I _think_ is 802.11h), but I don't remember what most of them are.
5. Wi-Fi stands for "Wireless Fidelity". Basically, a bunch of 802.11 card manufacturers got tired of the fact that different cards that implemented IEEE 802.11 were not interoperable. So WECA was born (Wireless Ethernet Compatibility Alliance). WECA decided that "IEEE 802.11" wasn't a marketing-friendly name, so they came up with "Wireless Fidelity" or "Wi-Fi" for short. Despite the marketing speak, this is actually a good organization. They have a whole slew of tests to determine whether an 802.11 radio is compatible with others that have passed the tests. If they pass, they get to put the Wi-Fi logo on their product. If a product has the Wi-Fi logo, then it can interoperate with any other radio that has passed the WECA tests. So there is a very minor distinction between Wi-Fi and 802.11. Basically, it is possible for a radio to implement 802.11 and not be Wi-Fi, but at this point, no company in their right mind would do so.
Well, that pretty much ends my rant. Take it for what you will.
-Freeptop
They are both wireless.. but comparing BlueTooth to 802.11b (PLEASE QUIT calling it 802.11, it's 802.11b, a small PART of 802.11. 802.11 encompases wired ethernet as well) is like comparing satellite transmission gear to your radio controlled model car. They just have nothing to do with each other, other than both use rf. Or to put it in other terms, it's like comparing Apples and Oranges.
If 802.11b succeeds (it already is) it will have nothing to do with how well Bluetooth does, and vice versa. Once again, to refresh, the point of bluetooth is this:
A low-cost all-inclusive chipset (1 or 2 chips) that can be added to any device to bluetooth-enable it. YES it's short range, low power. It was *designed* that way; it's not a shortcoming.
The whole idea was that, rather than have every company design proprietary wireless systems, they should all get together, develop a low-cost spec, and let the new market that's created work for itself.
of COURSE a palm *could* use 802.11b.... but it takes more power, and is overkill. Confuscious say 'Don't use a cannon to kill a mosquito'