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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!
There are ways around it - by having APs that can handle both protocols and thus can deal with both protocols being active at once. But given teh amount of 802.11 equipment out there already, I expect many places will resist Bluetooth devices since they don't want to have to buy new APs. Thus Bluetooth will have a tough time gaining ground.
I think its a neat idea, but heck - USB was supposed to reduce the rats nest around my PC too and hasn't so far - I'm still waiting for monitors with USB ports that your keyboard and mouse connect to - I knwo they exist, but its not widely done (nor are keyboards and mice over USB)
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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.
This sounds like the same arguments people were using for infrared ports a few years back, and that caught on like sandpaper pantyhose.
Bluetooth devices are failing for the same reasons infrared ports don't get used: they're just not that useful. Sure, when I want to print, it's awesome to be able to hold my PDA or laptop up to an HP printer and just fire away - but I have to hold it just so to maintain connectivity.
Bluetooth is the same way - you have to be so close that it's not really useful for much other than wireless keyboards and headphones. Don't even get me started about Bluetooth connections between a cell phone and a PDA: why shouldn't I just get out the cable and save even more battery power? No sense in burning extra power just to have the convenience of leaving my cell phone in my holster.
Am I wrong? Is there anything here that infrared didn't try to solve? Is there something that you would actually pay an extra $30 to add to your small battery-operated device, something that you wouldn't just use a cable or infrared for?
What's your damage, Heather?
Not to blame everything on Microsoft, but The Register had a good article on this a while back. Why the press can't figure out that they're complementary standards, not competitive ones, is beyond me.
Which one do I use if I have a medium sized device with a middlin' amount of power and want to communicate a moderate distance. Do I need both?
It gets worse. Even if you have a high-powered device like a laptop, the industry expects you to have both. You'll need Bluetooth to talk to your cell phone and PDA, and 802.11 to talk to your wireless lan. Forget that! Laptops are pricey enough as it is.
What's your damage, Heather?
Bluetooth is an interesting technology. When you start looking into it, the possibilities are enormous. A lot of people were bitten by the Bluetooth bug, and it's understandable why. It would be VERY cool if it worked out.
One of the huge problems is that people keep comparing 802.11b (WI-FI) to Bluetooth.
They are NOT the same thing. Go read the Bluetooth spec. Bluetooth is a cable replacement technology that can, if necessary, do some ad-hoc networking. 802.11b is wireless Ethernet. Not the same thing, not intended to do the same thing.
There have been a couple of companies that have been deliberately muddying the waters about this. Bluetooth is NOT an acceptable replacement or even a good substitute for 802.11b. Bluetooth is limited to 1megabit per second, which means throughput of about 650k to 800k real, depending on conditions. 802.11b is 11megabits max, and about 5megabits in the real world. (Shared bandwidth, retransmissions, and Ethernet overhead)
Bluetooth is staggeringly bad at providing traditional Ethernet services, just as 802.11b is awful as a cable replacement technology. 802.11b has too much power usage, and dependency on Ethernet for cable replacement. It was NOT designed to replace the cable going from your cell phone to your headset. Bluetooth was. It was just overly hyped and generally misunderstood. Too bad, it could have been cool.
Gedvondur
Information about this exploit doesn't seem to want to be free, for example, Slashdot wouldn't announce AirSnort when it came out. We shouldn't be satisfied until we can buy a wireless ethernet card with very strong encryption. However, if people continue to buy 802.11b cards, the hardware manufacturers will have no pressure to develop a less broken protocol.
Yes, I'm still a junky. Are you still a bitch?
It's been pointed out that 802.11 could have a low-power mode. 802.11 HAS a low-power mode: it's called PCF, and nobody uses it. But really, if you don't mind the power drain on the slave (the master can't sleep anyways), you can even use a low-power transmitted with DCF.
/. attitude towards Bluetooth. When MS creates proprietary standards, cool or otherwise, everyone rails on them. When Intel does it in cooperation with a couple other big names, but shuts out public participation, some people here seem to frown on the demise of the standard. While the IEEE standards process is not quite as open as the IETF, I'd take an IEEE standard over a Bluetooth SIG standard any day.
The point is Bluetooth screws up 802.11, and which is more important, your LAN that allows people to get work done when they're not in their cube, or Bluetooth which lets people talk on their cell phone using an earpiece without wires? That's a tough call, Intel.
I can't understand the
"...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. "
These aren't "different uses". Different uses would be something like "walking the dog" vs "picking my teeth" or "flying the space shuttle" vs "trimming the hedges". Both of *your* examples are "using a portable computer to communicate wirelessly".
I mean, consider this. You go to Circuit City and ask to buy some speakers. The guy there says "Well, for DVDs or for VHS?" Ummmm....does it matter? "Of course. They are totally different technologies. One uses magnetic tape while the other is an optical disk technology. Totally incompatible. Don't even try playing VHS tape sound through DVD-compatible speakers."
Obviously different devices have different *optimal* solutions. But keep in mind that no device exists in a vacuum. If laptops are running 802.11 then handhelds better do the same or I simply won't buy one. It's not like the two camps having nothing to say to each other and can be fully partitioned.
324006
For a better article on factors driving the relative failure of bluetooth and sucess of 802.11b, read Bye-bye, Bluetooth by Bill Gurley (of Benchmark and Above The Crowd fame) courtesy news.com.
While I think Gurley makes some good points about the relative cost economies (Bluetooth doesn't seem to have an advantage) and the power of server connected applications versus localized networks, I wouldn't dismiss local device networking so fast. There's a lot of potential for cell phone to fixed point communication, cell/laptop transfer, vehicle networking, etc. that passive RF can't handle. For all of its good points, 802.11b is very difficult to get broad coverage with and GPRS/2.5G cellular technology is probably more economical if the cellular providers could ever come up with a good data pricing model.
Regards, RJS
This is the single largest reason that 802.11b will end up being a dead-end product from an
extensable infrastructure point of view.
If you look very, *very* carefully at 802.11b design, everything about it screams inadequate engineering. I espically get a kick out of all the "Wireless ISP" who are deploying the gear (oh, yeah, that's smart... bet your *entire* business plan on unprotected frequency space). It doesn't take a rocket-scientist to look at the three co-located access point limitation to realize that you can't even solve the map coloring problem (a standard cellular deployment/freq. propagation exercise) for the single vendor instance, let alone multiple vendors. And, hey, if you don't believe me, drop on by the NZNOG mailing list, where you would have found the following recent contribution:
> From: "Neil"
> Subject: CLEAR Net Tempest
> To:
>
> Hi All,
>
> Has anyone else had any problems with Clear's 802.11 wireless
> internet service (http://www.clear.net.nz/services/tempest.html) as
> a source of interference? They have just done a rollout in Rotorua
> and totally stoped 3 separate wireless networks that had been running
> together nicely for the past year or two.
>
> [...]
I won't even bother going into the inadequate engineering effort that was expended during the design of WEP. That's pretty much a dead horse anyway.
But beyond all this, the access point/slave node model, that the majority of 802.11b implementations use, is fundamentally non-extensiable. Lucent had some interesting peer-to-peer firmware releases, but I'm not even sure you can get them (even if you're willing to pay) these days. I also liked Rooftop systems, which seemed to have the most mature wireless architecture (too bad Nokia brought them out and basically killed the product). Another of my favorates is Breezecom, although I don't like the way they advertize the bandwidth (3mbps my ass), but some of their FHSS synchronization (unusable in the good old USA) make up for their marketing.
Bluetooth is cool because is basically fscks up 802.11b's day without becoming completely unusable (for non-time sensitive data) in and of itself. I can't wait until users start boosting their Bluetooth signals with ranger extending antenna and small amps. I'm also pissed with the freq. allocations; I'm tired of line-of-sight in a big way. Why the IEEE802.11 track didn't go down the high-bandwidth FHSS road is completely beyond me. Bascially, it's going to end up going down that road anyway, with the arrival of complete bastardization of 802.11b like the "Harmony" firmware relase for a certain brands of access points and slave cards. But, until I can buy a a set of Bluetooth legacy plugs for ethernet (two smallish pigtails that plug into eithernet sockets and get rid of the wire via layer 2 bridging... and hopefully with some client and switch end configurable filtering), I won't be a happy camper. Anyway, the easiest solution from the Bluetooth spectrum is just to side step the issue by building Bluetooth chips that can work on 900mhz, 2.4ghz and 5ghz freqs all at the same time. Of course, by the time you do that, you're not going to get the Bluetooth chip(s) to fit in a pen.
Until re-configurable wide-band wireless data tranceivers arrive, I'm afraid we're all stuck playing the stupid "which least fit, poorly engineered standard will gain the most market share and wipe out better alternatives" game. And at the moment, 802.11b is it with regard to data (and oddly enough, bluetooth is probably going to be the standard for the pseudo-analog signal... and by that I mean audio primarily... which is where you will see bluetooth being the most activly used... all you dumb-asses with Ericsson headsets can now look foolish for setting on an non-steero solution... too bad you're going to have to re-invest in Bluetooth once the first MP3 Bluetooth audio mixer comes on the market... and hey you marketing b*tches, where's my Bluetooth 1/4" audio jack plug powered with a watch battery to take care of all my "legacy audio" needs?)
It is possible to secure an 802.11b network, just get somebody competent to wrap an IPSEC VPN arround it.
I am just scanning through the Bluetooth documents, I do not see the tern 'AES' or 'RC4' or any other cipher I am familiar with in the acronyms, I do see the acronym LFSR however. Looks to me like they are using a Linear feedback shift register. If so my guess is that it will be lucky to survive three months of serious analysis.
I don't see the type of security architecture in Bluetooth that would be needed to support their applications securely. The 'Security Architecture' document appears to be one long explanation of why they are not providing any.
People should not take the lack of exploits of Bluetooth to indicate that it must be secure. People only started to look at 802.11b security after the devices went on sale branded 'secure'. If somebody wants my input at the design stage they have to pay me for it. If I am going to work for free I want to at least get publicity in return. Breaking a prototype specification does not create publcity and generate consulting gigs.
I don't buy the argument that Bluetooth is designed to serve a different market to 802.11b. A general purpose LAN will serve any general purpose, end of story.
The best idea the Bluetooth types have come up with for a killer application to date is allowing my laptop to talk to my cell phone. If I want my laptop making G3 wireless data calls I will get it a PCMCIA card to do just that. I don't want to buy a $300 bluetooth card and a new $500 cell phone. In Europe the standard cellphone contracts now allow multiple phones per household by default. That pricing model will apear in the US if G3 or GPRS are to take off.
If my wireless keyboard or mouse offendeth my 802.11b network I will cut them off.
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