Posted by
Hemos
on from the making-wireless-really-work dept.
LupeROD writes "Here's a story that shoulders the responsibility of trying to convince us all that the spectrum wars between 802.11 and Bluetooth are bogus and the truth, be it obscured, is that 802.11 and Bluetooth are really compadres.""
this is not new information
by
Fnkmaster
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
This article rehashes what we already know - the purposes of Bluetooth and 802.11b are fundamentally different - Bluetooth supports what he calls a WPAN (Wireless Personal Area Network) and 802.11b is for WLANs.
This article does not address the _real_ issue that I have heard quite a few people bring up - that the intentions of the technologies and their use cases are orthogonal, but they use the same chunk of bandwidth and the nature of their frequency usage does not play nicely with each other.
I don't know the exact details, but I've used older FHSS and DSSS WLAN technologies as well as 802.11b hardware and I believe it has something to do with the fact that one of Bluetooth or 802.11b is direct-signal and one is frequency-hopping and they therefore tend to obliterate each others signals intermittently. I can't personally testify to this, as I only have experience with 802.11b, but I will tell you that with a 2.4GHz portable phone that my mother bought and the old Proxim Symphony (FHSS if I remember correctly), the interference was a real problem in a practical situation. The 2.4GHz phone could not be used while sitting at the computer desk where the Symphony antenna lived, or the computer would lose connectivity. I finally ditched the wireless network in that apartment and moved to HPNA 2.0, a fabulous solution if your physical configuration doesn't allow good 2.4GHz transmission.
So yes, we would all love to have both Bluetooth and 802.11b work together in perfect harmony and we accept that they don't really compete, and there have been several/. articles with many postings to that effect. The real question is how do we make a technical solution to get the two standards to play nice with each other, if indeed the problems are as significant as I imagine they will be (based on anecdotal reports from others and based on my personal experience with 2.4GHz technology).
Slashdot Mirror
This article does not address the _real_ issue that I have heard quite a few people bring up - that the intentions of the technologies and their use cases are orthogonal, but they use the same chunk of bandwidth and the nature of their frequency usage does not play nicely with each other.
I don't know the exact details, but I've used older FHSS and DSSS WLAN technologies as well as 802.11b hardware and I believe it has something to do with the fact that one of Bluetooth or 802.11b is direct-signal and one is frequency-hopping and they therefore tend to obliterate each others signals intermittently. I can't personally testify to this, as I only have experience with 802.11b, but I will tell you that with a 2.4GHz portable phone that my mother bought and the old Proxim Symphony (FHSS if I remember correctly), the interference was a real problem in a practical situation. The 2.4GHz phone could not be used while sitting at the computer desk where the Symphony antenna lived, or the computer would lose connectivity. I finally ditched the wireless network in that apartment and moved to HPNA 2.0, a fabulous solution if your physical configuration doesn't allow good 2.4GHz transmission.
So yes, we would all love to have both Bluetooth and 802.11b work together in perfect harmony and we accept that they don't really compete, and there have been several