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Xbox 360's Jamming Wireless Signals?
WirePosted writes "A report has emerged suggesting the Xbox 360's inbuilt wireless system for communication with wireless controllers and headsets is transmitting over a wide area of the 2.4Ghz spectrum, causing interference to WLAN's and other 2.4Ghz devices."
It's bad because 2.4 Ghz is radio, carrying digital info, which due to the nature of the produced sign wave results in a signal distortion more commonly known as "bleed over". Without the ability to separate the signals by a large frequency, digital over analog bleeds all over the place.
The hell? There is nothing magic about digital data that means you can't bandwidth-limit the outgoing transmission. There are plenty of digital radio protocols that use a very well defined slice of bandwidth, without any more bleed over than traditional AM or FM radio analog broadcasts. Just because the signal represents digital data doesn't mean you have to use square waves or something.
I suppose we should all be thankful that radio engineers are better educated than the average Slashdot poster...
(Of course, it's entirely possible there's something broken about the XBOX radio. It's also entirely possible it's just a spread-spectrum transmitter doing exactly what it's supposed to do in a largely unregulated piece of spectrum.)
WiFi refreshes so often that most people dont notice the significant proformance drop
their internet connection is almost always the real choke point anyways.
A small college is experience problems with their new wireless network equipment in the presence of a few xbox's. however, apparently all over the rest of the country, in huge universities with thousands of xbox 360s... there's no problem whatsoever. the only bit that doesn't fit with this is that they said the IT staff had issues using their bluetooth headsets. now, the only comment i can make on this is that i think they have cheap bluetooth headsets. they said the 360 makes the signal even when its not turned on... just plugged in. i have both a ps3 & 360 virtually one on top of the other (a shelf plus a few inches of space in between) and the ps3's bluetooth controllers work just as fine as they did before i got the 360. so, all in all, i think this is a load of bull. the 360 has been out for way too long for this to not have been noticed. i think something else is screwing with their headsets & wireless network. or maybe its just the wireless network thats screwing with the headsets and they're looking for a scapegoat.
Bluetooth doesn't "play nicely" with WiFi. Bluetooth (from 1.2 onwards) was designed to remove channels that are being used from it's hopping sequence. But until it detects that those channels are in use (which may take quite awhile if your wifi network doesn't have a lot of traffic) you are still going to have interference issues. WiFi will usually "win", in that if either of the devices is going to be affected by the interference it's much more likely to be the bluetooth one.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.