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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!
Watch Evil Dead.
You can't kill something if it's already dead.
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)
Top Most Bizarre/Disturbing Error Messages
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)
It's too bad to see Bluetooth struggling to get out of the gates as I think the concept is right on the money. Imagine the ability to have your palm synchronize simply by entering the same room as your PC. Or your notebook to hop onto the LAN automatically when you enter your office. Or seamlessly having all the devices in your home networked without cables? A Bluetooth-enabled thermostat or burglar alarm could be configured easily from your PC without any wires. You could set your VCR to record "Seinfeld" from your desktop or (even better) from work using a browser. All without a single wire! I think there's a huge market for this type of technology, I hope Bluetooth can be rescued!
Somebody turned me onto this page that talks about how a group of guys are making a mission out of setting up localized, free wireless access to the Internet, with the ultimate goal being able to fire up your laptop anywhere within your city and get on the net for free. All it takes is a couple hundred dollars (which isnt much when shared between 20 people who pitch in, initially) and a guy who controls anything as meager as a DSL line willing to "donate" some of his bandwidth to the antenna.
If anything, stuff like this will kill Bluetooth from a purely VHS vs. Beta sort of way. When it comes down to a fight between popular acceptance versus quality of technology, popular acceptance always wins.
Cheers,
Bowie J. Poag
ntl (UK) has just announced a trial of a wireless (10Ghz) broadband offering in London.
Detail over yonder.
A little know fact is that you can vary the power on 802.11 adapters/accesspoints to acheive much of the "short range" capabilities of bluetooth.
A review of the xircom 802.11 springboard module.
http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/wireless/2001/0
--iamnotayam
Losing the wires is definately nice, but since 802.11b is more geared towards wireless networking outside of the home, it will probably saturate the market first - through stores a la Starbucks and corperations picking up the technology. Only once people see it at work/play will they buy into the technology at home. If bluetooth is cost/tech ready by that point, it will probably have its own successful coming out party .. but I definately agree .. two fundamental uses; I'd be suspicious I wasn't getting the most cost-effective solution if 802.11b was used in place of bluetooth in short-range wireless communication.
"Old man yells at systemd"
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?
Actually the "802.11" that you are speaking of is really called 802.11b (yes the 'b' is important). 802.11b is the standard that most everyone thinks of when they here wireless LAN, the 11Mbps transfer rate distance of 100 or 300 meters or something like that. But there are several other 802.11 specs out there, for instance the 54Mbps standard that will make use of the 5GHz ISM band, or the 802.11a standard (I believe it is a, might be g) which is in fact a direct competetor for Bluetooth. That is it is a low power short range wireless networking system designed to link things like handhelds and whatever else. It is not that far from release and probably will over shadow Bluetooth (mostly because BT sucks, I have been doing some extensive testing and it has the stability of a MS operating system). Anyway, just a few notes, thought that I might correct the guy on the Slashdot payroll who flaps his lips about things that he is obviously not educated about.
A couple of Register stories: Psion dump Bluetooth due to lack of demand; and Microsoft knifes Bluetooth in the back. Let's hear it for good old fashioned British sarcasm, cynicism and *hey!* accurate reporting ;)
the article is actually at http://archives.nytimes.com/2001/08/20/technology/ ebusiness/20BLUE.html
funny munging
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.
Actually wireless ethernet maybe more suited for handhelds then you may think. 11 mbps is the way almost everyone runs it by default, but nothing says you can't use 1Mbps. By reducing the data rate, and power you can probably get a very low power PDA type connection with an acceptable range. In fact I've already seen CF cards that support 802.11 (from symbol), but there are no drivers for my TRGPro yet :-(.
What will plague both of these standards though is the half arse security design. Which ever one can address enterprise level security, wide range use (PDA to desktop), and enough bandwidth for the applications used (1Mbps is probably enough for small devices, but not for heavy file sharing. So which will be the driving factor?) will probably push the other out of the market.
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
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.
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?
Hopefully this isn't too oftopic - I thought it was informative enough for the current discussion...
h _s ony_handycam_dc_1.html
I just came across this on Yahoo... looks like Sony's new Handicams will have Bluetooth chips built in:
http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/nm/20010820/tc/tec
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
It's not dead, it's pining... for the fjords...
Yep, and even the NYT gets it wrong in the article. More evidence that the American press is in the entertainment business, not the information business. What a shame.
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.
Xircom (?) offers an 802.11 expansion for the Visor handhelds. Let's you hook straight into the network. I'd really like to see BlueTooth as well (being an alternative to the IR port), but it wouldn't fill the same gap. I personally think BlueTooth may be having some problems right now...
SIG: HUP
My cordless phone drops the 802.11b connection to a bare minimum if it doesn't block it altogether. I once tried to set up a WiFi network at a customer's house and after trying several pieces of equipment, we finally figured out that it was the neighbors cordless phone causing the WLAN to go down every few minutes.
With the 802.11x security problems that have been exposed recently, I'd say that we need a new wireless standard altogether. One that is all-encompassing. Low power/bandwidth for those portables and more bandwidth for the other devices.
Life is the leading cause of death in America.
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.
Well, the problem isn't really 802.11 (in terms of the cordless problem) Its the fact that 802.11 uses a public band which means other stuff can use it too (and interfere with it) But if you move wireless LAns into a non public radio band, the cost goes way up as now you have to deal with the FCC and licenses. Honestly I have no idea why they even make 2.4GHz cordless phones - I mean do you REALLY need your cordless to work a mile from your home (hint - it's called cellular - get one :) ) So the bottom line is if you want inexpensive wireless gear, its gonna use a public spectrum slice and you're always going to have to deal with other devices in it.
I think folk shave been giving 802.11 a bad rap. it does a very good job. Sure WEP can be broken, but that can be fixed. I love my wireless gear and have no complaints so far! Considering you can get APs < $200 and PCMCIA cards < $99, thats pretty good! Throw in a fix for WEP and I honestly coudl care less if 802.11 kills Bluetooth :)
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And I like them,
:-)
I went to Ericsson once where they showed us a bunch of stuff working over bluetooth (vending machines, connections to pda's, laptops, internet radios, web pads and overhead beamers) and I must say I was impressed.
Interference may be an issue though but in the long run I think a technology like Bluetooth (not necesarily Bluetooth itself) will reach a large market. At some point in the future we will all probably have some fiber/DSL X megabit line into our home which is hooked up to some routing thing that sends the whole stream into the air thru some shortish range technology. From that point on we can access that broadband line from every Bluetooth enables device in our home. You don't need a high power 150' range wireless lan for that, you'd just upset the neighbourhood then.
Wireless lan may be able to do the same thing but as far as I know it's probably going to be a lot more expensive, Bluetooth and wireless lan are 2 different things (which was one of the first things I heard from the Ericsson people) with different uses. The Bluetooth organisation thingy whatever comittee or something wants to get the price of a chip under $5 so practically every manufacturer will throw in bluetooth, if only as a marketing thing. I don't see that happening with wireless lan.
Besides all that LAN's Ethernet, AFAIK, and Bluetooth makes individual connections to different devices on different frequencies, again AFAIK. Bluetooth just seems a lot more efficient to hook up devices that don't need a gazillion bits to operate at an acceptable level.
Ok, I'll stop ranting now, it's the end of the working day and I can't say I'm feeling very coherent
-- Si hoc legere scis nimium eruditionis habes.
heck - USB was supposed to reduce the rats nest around my PC too and hasn't so far
Ummm, no it wasn't! How exactly would USB reduce the rats nest (i.e. lots of wires) around your PC, when it, too, uses wires?
USB was designed to provide faster data throughput than serial/parallel cables, hot-plug&play, and the ability to use a huge # of devices... all for a relatively low cost.
It was NOT designed to reduce the # of wires around your computer system. That's what Bluetooth is for.
"And like that
About the speed of 802.11b... I just read a review of 10 or so access points and card combos. They had Cisco's Aironet at 4.8 Mbps. Most of the others were in the 2.5 - 4.0 range. This is fine for web or generic work, but it just won't fly in the corporate world.
Most of the consulting I have done in evaluating wireless LAN products has led to the conclusion that it is only good for laptops, and only light to moderate use at that. Most coders or DBAs won't touch it if they can't get 100 Mbps.
Ummm, Jon, aren't you supposed to be dead...? - Otter(3800)
Here is an article on Yahoo about Sony Handycam's
using Bluetooth to make them "networkable" for sharing media.
Is it just me or does Sony seem to support a lot of varied technologies? Seems it would make them less disaster-prone to debacles involving putting all of their technological "eggs" in one proverbial basket. It kind of makes sense when you have Sony's financial backing to be on every bandwagon that comes through town.
They were foremost in the mini-disk market (which sadly didn't make it because I bought one
Just a thought.
Co-founder and designer at Music Nearby: http://musicnearby.com
This is easy to fix. Simply change the channel that your wireless HUB is on and the devices will find it. I find that that channels 2, 6 and 10 tend to be the ones most free of trouble from 2.4Ghz phones. The default channel (11) on many wireless hubs is just an awful choice.
--- I do not moderate.
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.
"...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
In fact, given 802's security problems with weak encryption, it's likely to be replaced in a few years with something stronger. Which doesn't mean that free bootleg connections and a semi-anonymous, always-on world aren't coming anyway.
Expanding a vast wasteland since 1996.
Remember those "friendly" aliens from Mars in "Mars Attacks"? Swap in Bill Gates for each alien and then think about what's the fuss about Bluetooth....
The problem is this: Microsoft is dis'ing Bluetooth and pushing 802.11 for all the wrong reasons. 802.11 is a good technology but it forces the small device( ie Palms ) to be bigger. WinCE devices are already FAT because the OS and the plethora of capabilities pre-packaged. This is why Microsoft is pushing 802.11 over Bluetooth. It takes care of two big headaches it has.....Palm based handhelds are becoming the place were users keep their data and the computer/network is a backup or copy of the PDA. This isn't what Microsoft wants because it wants to own your data and charge you to access it. By pushing for the death of Bluetooth it stalls Palms move into wireless, leaves Palm handhelds stranded by requiring it be "tethered" to a computer they can keep track of, and gets another shot at moving your data into it's hands instead of yours.
Another technology attacked to preserve the almighty Microsoft corporation.....
"Anyone who stands out in the middle of a road looks like roadkill to me." --Linus
Sounds like your dream box is already here.
Take your pick, iMac or G4 Tower.
iMac - one power, one Ethernet (or you can go Airport and eliminate that) and a single USB cable for the keyboard and mouse.
G4 has that sweet USB/Display/Display power cable from the CPU to the display, Ethernet (or you can go wireless here too) and power. Keyboard and mouse are on the single USB cable.
My girlfriend's iMac DV setup sounds just like your dream box and desk. Me, I have an old G3 tower with a rat's nest of cables...can anyone tell me why cables will always get tangled?
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
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
The article is about a year out of date... 802.11b has basically won over HomeRF, and is likely to dent Bluetooth's popularity a lot. Personally, I think they both have their place, but Bluetooth will have to address its interference with 802.11b if it is not to be banned from the Wi-Fi workplace and avoided in Wi-Fi homes.
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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I love reading about Bluetooth! Some of the examples I've read:
"You walk into an airport, and they beam your ticket to your cell phone or PDA." I've seen the airlines lose my luggage before; I think they'll find a way to screw up beaming me my ticket. Anyway, this would require some sort of encryption because they'd want to know if my luggage has been with me, am I the person who really owns this PDA, etc. No, I suspect that Bluetooth will really result in me getting 3 ads for airport gift shops sent to my PDA when I walk in the door.
"You walk in your house and your Palm automatically synchronizes" Sounds great. My Palm confuses my contact manager too often -- duplicate names, to-do's not checked, meetings duplicated. I do want my PDA doing anything without my permission first.
No, I expect Bluetooth will revolutionalize our lives the way infrared in PDAs revolutionalized how we exchange business cards. And *nobody* has printed business cards anymore, right? I work in the telecom industry, and I've seen someone beam a business card maybe 3 times in the last 4 years of the PDA-revolution.
Insert simplistic political, ideological, or personal proselytization here.
Read it in last month's print version; here it is online:
t ml
http://www.sciam.com/2001/0801issue/0801scicit4.h
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'
Rather like USB vs. FireWire, eh?
Tho' it's nice to see than Intel has finally seen the light WRT IEEE 1394, rather than trying to shove USB2 down developers' throats for applications that 1394 is much more suited.
It doesn't mean much now, it's built for the future.
...the real problem was that it was a great idea without a market. Basically, the folks doing the market research didn't do their jobs right, or like the analysts in the dot-com craze of the past couple of years, led themselves to believe that the old rules didn't apply.
The real problem is that Bluetooth has a range of only about 10m. In one famous example, an expo was supposed to have wired an entire building with Bluetooth. They put the access points in the ceiling. The problem was, the ceiling was over 10m high! So it was a bust.
The criticism of the article that the two products have different uses makes sense, because Bluetooth isn't being "beaten" by 802.11. 802.11 has an actual use, a market, and products people want to buy. If Bluetooth dies, it'll be because it died on its own, without help or hindrance from 802.11.
Bluetooth's use was intended for inter-device communication at short range.
802.11 is for full-blown wireless networking.
Bluetooth is good for proximity-based services (neat things like flipping from free long-distance for authorized people when using a company phone, or how about a car door that unlocks as you approach?)
I don't want bluetooth as a wireless standard for talking between computers, but I would love to have it for having minor accessories talk to a central hub computer, such as the Anoto pen. What with all this talk about 802.11b being so unsecure, there should be room for another standard in the mix.
"Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart, he dreams himself your master."
You're going to transmit motion video over a cell phone link?
Spread spectrum has nothing to do with it; you can certainly go 20 miles with the proper antennae/protocol/amplifier (depending).
802.11b cards, proper antennae and cabling, you can do 20 miles.
Switch to another protocol, optimized for the exact distance and application, you can get even more speed out of it.
Yeah, because you really just can't run bandwidth intensive applications like vi with only 5 to 10 Mbits/sec.
Pedantic correction (the best kind of correction). 802.11 is Ethernet. RJ45/Cat 5 is wired Ethernet. Ethernet is a wireless standard.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
I just realized this when I woke up this morning (long time after this post). Not sure what I was thinking.. sorry for the bad info.
Not sure why I thought 802.11 included wired sttuff... I was getting mixed up with 802.3 and 802 in general.