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RIM Crippling BlackBerry Bluetooth Speed?
Alex King writes " I organized a bounty for the creation of a 'BlackBerry as a modem' solution for Mac OS X earlier this year. The resulting product — Pulse, from Brain Murmurs — allows you to use your BlackBerry as a standard Bluetooth modem. It works great on both Windows and Mac. Current problem: The Pulse solution doesn't run as fast as it used to. Brain Murmurs did a bunch of testing and working with their users and found the problem: RIM has crippled the Bluetooth speeds in recent OS upgrades. Is this a 'mistake' on RIM's side that will be fixed? Or did they do this on purpose for some reason?"
Maybe the author of the blog should have considered asking RIM what the problem is?
/. headline) is to generate plenty of hits to a page which extolls the virtues of the software & software house in question.
I guess the point of the blog (and the trollish
There are shills on slashdot. Apparently, I'm one of them.
We here at Slashdot will rationally analyze all the nuances of your question before replying with a well-researched and neutral opinion. You just wait.
I've got a Samsung Blackjack with Cingular HSDPA. On the phone itself or via USB, I can pull 700kbit/sec down on a bandwidth test.
Yet over Bluetooth network access profile, I can only get around 300kbit/sec. Both devices are Bluetooth 2.0+EDR, and I'm using the Widcomm Bluetooth stack that came with the laptop. The network devices claims a connection at 700kbit/sec, and the theoretical maximum of 2.0+EDR is 2.1MBit/sec IIRC.
Any ideas?
...a RIMjob?
Want to improve your Karma? Instead of "Post Anonymously", try the "Post Humously" option.
In Soviet Union, CIA software cripples you!
Nice way to get you off other networks.
You want speed - only 'the' telco's network is at 200+k
You want the outside world its at 65k.
So you will stay in the sandpit.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
You abuse their network with your modem software. They have a network designed for messaging, and you want to send huge files over it. I don't blame them for wanting to cripple a capability that they never wanted to sell you.
You get what you pay for. Usually.
Dog is my co-pilot.
Haven't seen an IP over RF provider who didn't start ruthlessly choking off bandwidth to anyone who actually consumes more than a few sips of their 'high speed Internet' products. It is OK if you do a few short bursts now and again, that is the usage model they built their network around. A Blouetooth connection to a laptop implies more than that so once the network operator noticed they had users USING their network they acted quickly to fix the problem.
The crux of the problem is that no RF system that has been deployed has enough bandwidth to supply 'broadbad' like connectivity to very many people at the same time. So the early adopters get it good, tell their friends and watch it all turn to crap. Unless we see microcells on every lamppost we aren't likely to ever solve the problem either. And no amount of marketing promises can change it, you can't repeal the laws of physics.
Cable modems had exactly the same problem of a shared resource quickly becoming overused. The cable industry could solve it by breaking up their originally simplistic network into lots of small segments because they could string FIBER to backhaul all of the neighborhood networks. Unless the wireless companies want to do likewise they are never going to be a player in the broadband game as anything other than a niche product priced high (billed by the bit) enough to limit usage to the available spectrum.
Democrat delenda est
When did RIM get bought out by Verizon?
My own pointless vanity vintage computing page
Since the question of this story is rather pointless, I'll go slightly off topic.
One thing that RIM is "crippling" is 911 systems across the nation. My wife and I both have one of those new Blackberry 8100 Pearl smartphones. It's really nice, except for one major flaw. When the phone is locked, pressing the scroll wheel once, rolling it down and pressing it again automatically makes a call to 911 - and there is no way to turn it off. It may seem like with three actions required (press, roll, press), it wouldn't be that easy to accidentally make a call, but my two year old son disagrees. He has made at least ten 911 calls over the last week on mine and my wifes phones combined and a couple of times the calls were triggered when the phone was just sitting in my pocket.
With all of our previous phones, we would lock them and if my son picked them up it would be no big deal. Now, we are forced to either have our phones on us at all time, or put them on the top of the fridge or some other extremely inaccessible place.
I've put a request in to RIM to make it so you can disable that feature in their next software update. Hopefully they listen.
I don't always use unix-like operating systems; but when I do, I prefer FreeBSD.
Dear AlexKing, Instead of accusing RIM of disabling your "bountied" software, why don't you open source it so that we can all look for bugs in the implementation? After all, when the bounty was offered no one told any of the contributors that this would be for a commercial, closed source product, and many of us who contributed to the project are angry and disappointed that it was hijacked for a proprietary, closed project. Open it up!!!
When you use a Blackberry as a GSM modem, the data never (or at least, shouldn't ever) travels over RIM's network. It's not like you're chunking a file into little pieces and attaching it to emails. It's just using the Blackberry's connection to the cellular network to transfer data.
If the cellular company didn't want you doing that, they could certainly ratelimit you, but generally most people using smartphones have an unlimited-data plan, which would let them use a PC Card-style GSM modem or other type of phone to push as many packets as they wanted. The cellular infrastructure is designed to give data service a lower priority than voice calls, and it's all designed with QoS in mind -- this isn't like your neighborhood cable modem setup. I know that T-Mobile doesn't mind if you use full-speed Internet access on your EDGE device; that's included in the $30/mo extra you pay for data access. (I assume if you were really abusive in some way, they might cut you off, but that's not the issue here.)
I think that this guy should send a polite letter to RIM asking what the deal is. I don't get if it's an all-over Blackberry issue, or a PC/Mac one, where PC users can do this modem thing at full speed, and Mac users get a reduced rate. If that's the case, then it's fairly odd. But more likely, I tend to wonder if they didn't just drop the rate on the BT connection because they never figured that anybody would be doing anything with it other than using BT headsets and syncing data with their desktop computer from time to time. Maybe the lower connection prevents packet loss in other circumstances. At any rate, it seems odd for them to crap so obviously over a feature, particularly one that some of their competitors' products offer.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
Even with products like the PDA cell phones with all-out broadband access competing with the blackberry, these people still don't feel they have to worry about the free market.
Which is why I decided to forego the blackberry and get a Treo.
--- Grow a pair, liberals... stop letting the Republicans bully you!
Before looking for a communist under every bush, consider that there are quite a few things to get right to get BT working. A BT driver depends on other drivers (eg often serial drivers) and slight changes in the realtime behaviour of drivers can cause link errors which cause corruptions and retires etc and ultimately reduce BT throughput. Extra interrupts etc in the system can easily cause BT errors.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
your a dick snapper, accusing someone else of being the cause of your software not performing properly. stop trying to whore fucking page counts by whining on /.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
.... what you can blame on incompetency.
I don;t think the company delibrately did it. What do they have to gain from it?
Must have been a f*ck up somewhere in developing the stuff.
"Doing what i can, with what i have." ~ Burt Gummer
Did anyone actually look at the feature with RIM claims on the Bluetooth PICS? I guess not. Can it be that they are supporting the faster modulation? Even if it were bluetooth 2.0, they are not required to support 4-DPQSK and 8-DPSK. Basic GMSK modulation is all that is mandatory. It's not really possible to lower the speed in the ways they suggest actually. It's clear that this person really knows nothing about Bluetooth at all. Check out the core spec at bluetooth.com
I have kids. Certain things they can touch. Certain things they cannot. That's why we buy them clever toys.
You remind me of a co-worker who when at home always has his daughter on his lap. As we're IM's each other about work stuff, you get random bits of gibberish. It's his daughter, and he keeps her on his lap. And she likes to press buttons.
He's an idiot parent is the only thing I can gather. When working throw the kids out of the room and work. And why annoy the piss out of me just because he doesn't understand the need to isolate himself when he's working.
My kids have grown up normally and I managed to tell them "no" a lot of the time.
NOT EVERY WHIM OF YOUR CHILD MUST BE INDULGED. IT'S OKAY TO SAY "NO" TO MOST THINGS A CHILD WANTS. CHILDREN WANT EVERYTHING. YOU'RE NOT BEING A BAD PARENT WHEN YOU PUT THE PHONE UP HIGH AND SAY "SORRY BABYKINS NO CAN PLAY". AND WHEN THEY WHINE ABOUT IT YOU IGNORE IT.
In other news, Nextel acquitted on accusations of crippling BT data speeds. The Judge replied, "Simply, they do not offer data over BT. I could not rule them guilty over something they do not offer".
Nextel was over more than happy with this ruling and stated they will continue to not offer many other services.
ba-dum tishhhh
Why is it that when you believe something it's an opinion, but when I believe something it's a manifesto?
Over here on the other side of the Atlantic in Scandinavia, not only the hardware companies but also the telcos plug BT connections very hard as part fof their marketing. In other words it comes as no surprise that a Nokia E61 (or Sony Ericsson P990i, etc) can be used as a BT modem with the 3G network out of the box, giving excellent speeds. I do it daily travelling on business across Europe from OS X/XP/Linux laptops. The Nokia E61 (et al) also matches (and/or surpasses) the feature set of the Blackberry, including push mail, mobile Exchange sync, etc, etc. There is one thing with data speeds though that must always be remembered. Most operators still have a priority for voice built into the network. This means that every GPRS connection searches for "gaps" in the voice traffic (in Swedish they are called the direct translation of "time gaps", don't know the exact English term) to and from the particular mast you are connectiong to. And depending on how many are available at the time, your connection will be alloted X such "gaps" and the number of them determine the speed of your connection. So, if you're in a urban area at, say, lunch time there might be fewer gaps available for data, compared to a rurally situated mast at the same time. Or, later in the afternoon or if you just move a couple of blocks, getting you connected to another mast. Usually, it's even easier. If you find yourself with a less than ideal connection, you just disconnect and connect again and most of the times you then get a better allotment. A bit like getting a "better line" in the old land line voice world. And this restriction on data traffic will probably not go away until the operators see that they actually have more data then voice in their books.
...Bluetooth transfers you !
Slow Bluetooth on Blackberry? Who greenlighted this decision? This makes me see red. If they ever catch the yellow, lily-livered blackguard, I hope they give him a pink slip. - - Orange you glad I stopped after two lines?
Either this guy hosts his blog on his Blackberry, or he's slashdotted.
All I want is a secure system where it's easy to do anything I want. Is that too much to ask ~~ Randall Munroe
A little bit of the point has been missed here. Sadly, Bluetooth has devolved from a wireless communication protocol to a marketing idiom by industries which are more driven to leverage the moniker than adhere to the protocol itself. Unlike IEEE's 802.11 protocols, which focus on data transfer which by nature cannot be altered, Bluetooth offers a protocol that drives a smörgåsbord of services, which were intended to be delivered as a package yet in reality are being cherry-picked to insert into devices. What really grinds my gears is not how a specific Bluetooth function performs on a device (such as the modem link), but how a device is marketed to have Bluetooth functionality, but then device-appropriate functions are disabled (such as Verizon's disabling of OBEX file transfer on cell-phones, to keep data over the profit-generating network). IMHO, if you're going to offer Bluetooth, offer the full catalog of device-specific features, not all of which are enabled on any RIM device.
mistakes are too stupid to allow you to do things,
but that was stupid, but since you know i said this, you will go do it.
tell everybody, thx. see ya niggas.
Older model BlackBerrys (i.e. pre-Pearl) do not support Bluetooth dialup networking, so anything that makes this work is a hack and should be expected to work as such.
The Pearl, however (and most likely the not-yet-released 8800) *does* support this, and it does it with the standard Bluetooth profile for doing this sort of thing - no hack required. I regularly connect my laptop through my Pearl over Bluetooth, and it works beautifully in both OS X and Windows. It's not very speedy, but I do get 10-15k/sec downloads, which is good enough for what I use it for.
RIM is getting *better* about Bluetooth crippling, not worse. But if you try to force an older model to do something it wasn't designed for, don't be surprised when it doesn't work as well as you had hoped.
No good joke goes unsaid.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
Do this...
I'm wildly speculating about this, howver you can imagine how the telcos can influence such a 'limitation'
Heck, we'll see this with the wifi handoff being mysteriously disabled/crippled/perform crappy or just be taken out entirely.
...but then the Pearl has a far more capable bluetooth stack to begin with. I installed the latest T-Mobile firmware update earlier this week and have had no speed problems when using the phone as a bluetooth modem (only through OS X, as I don't have a Windows laptop).
Use your Blackberry Pearl as a Bluetooth Modem in OS X
The BlackBerry 8100 "Pearl" has a standby mode. Instead of holding down "*" to look the keyboard, like you did with earlier BlackBerry models, hold down the mute button, which is a small silver button on the top of the phone. This will put the phone into Standby, which is a low-power mode where the screen is black and no buttons function on the phone, including the scroll ball. The phone will still receive calls and messages and will give notifications. To bring it back out of Standby, press the mute button again once. Problem solved.
Breakfast served all day!
Swap for an 8100 and use this script.
Script for the 8100
If you're stuck with an 8700 and in legal reach of this guy, read on.
It might be more than just a pppd that is aware to bluetooth connections, but that'd be the general direction to look when cutting this guy at the pass. Dont worry, he'll be humbled when there's someone that does it without the Ivory Tower mindset. There was some talk about porting existing stuff from some linux app to OS X, IIRC.
As for the other posts before me in this thread, Alexking (and ArrogantMurmur) just justifying (their personal) arrogance and elitism, crazyray. Why it happens on this platform a lot more is an exercise to the reader.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.