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?"

Comments

Other Bluetooth speed anomalies.

[nxtw]

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?

One thing that RIM is crippling

[toadlife]

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.

Why not open source the software?

[crazyray]

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!!!

No, fact check.

[Kadin2048]

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.

Thats just silly

[pablo_max]

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

Re:Having worked on a BT product I agree

[arivanov]

That would have been the case with any BT driver and any BT product but crackberry. The crackberry is usually placed by operators on all-you-can-eat plans which presume only mail access to the crackberry server. The crackberry server eats surprisingly (actually the best word is phenomanally) little bandwidth. 1Kbit average per 20 users is normal. As a result the operators can afford all-you-can-eat without a problem. The moment the users start actively using it for data these assumptions go out of the window.

So, I would not be surprised if the operators demanded the feature and the feature got rolled out quietly. In other words, I would not be surprised if there is a communist hidden in the Bush.