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Mesh Networking Comes To Bluetooth, Which Could Set Off a New Wave of Smart Buildings (geekwire.com)
One of the most widely used technologies in mobile computing is getting an important upgrade that could accelerate the development of the smart home and industrial internet. From a report: The Bluetooth Special Interest Group, the Kirkland, Wash.-based group that enforces compatibility among the billions of devices that use the short-range Bluetooth wireless technology, plans to announce Tuesday that the standard now supports mesh networking. Mesh networks connect a variety of access points and devices across a distributed network, rather than the one-to-one connection that currently exists between your smartphone and that headset that makes you look ridiculous. This approach dramatically improves the range and reliability of a wireless network, since information can be relayed across several different devices rather than having to stretch between two far-apart devices. And if part of the network goes offline, mesh technology has the capability to route around that outage and still carry out its original mission. Wi-Fi networks have also been getting in on this mesh networking act, which has an additional bonus: mesh networks are much easier to set up than traditional wireless networks.
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Mesh Networking Comes To Bluetooth, Which Will Set Off a New Wave of Botnets
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
When I worked at Cisco in 2013, we were testing IP phones on the wireless network. One neat feature was to start a call on the fourth floor, take the elevator down, and go out into the parking lot without ever losing the connection. Never mind that a half-dozen access points seamlessly handled the call, including one AP inside the elevator and an AP in the parking lot.
Hark, a shiny! Let us use it to jam 2.4GHz ISM band to the point that it's completely unusable!
In all seriousness, unlicensed spectrum needs some.. help. I know it doesn't make any money for anyone directly, but still... ISM gets a whopping ~380 MHz of bandwidth in bands under 10GHz, 350 of which is in 2.4/5.8GHz. All the acronyms (FHSS, etc.) in the world can't save you from the fact that everyone else is already using the band.
There is no XUL, only WebExtensions...
Z-wave never scaled very well, it works best for very small networks. Zigbee on the other hand performs well and has been growing by leaps and bounds. Thread enjoys some technical advantages over Zigbee, such as adding routers as needed, but lacks the Zigbee application layer that allows different devices to talk a common language. The future is interesting indeed.
Never mind worrying about so-called, over-hyped, mostly fake 'AI' nonsense 'taking over the world', or 'robots shooting us dead in the streets', or whatever the hell it was that Musk was on about yesterday, what we really need to worry about is so-called 'smart buildings', absolutely saturated with poorly designed and poorly secured 'IoT' nonsense getting hacked into, turning whole buildings against their occupants. It'll be the new 'ransomware': 'Pay us X amount of bitcoins, or we don't allow the building to let people leave/breathe/out of the elevators/(insert whatever mischief they can accomplish, here)'.