Why Has 802.11 Flourished and Bluetooth Failed? [Archive]

Jason Dunn

06-12-2003, 06:30 PM

<div class='os_post_top_link'><a href='http://techupdate.zdnet.com/techupdate/stories/main/0%2C14179%2C2913885%2C00.html' target='_blank'>http://techupdate.zdnet.com/techupd...13885%2C00.html</a><br /><br /></div>"The crux of the problem is that 802.11 represents the Internet and Bluetooth represents the faux Internet, and getting to know the difference gives us an understanding of what the Internet really is. On the surface, both promise connectivity without wires. That's really all 802.11 promises. <br /><br />The Bluetooth story sounds much better. It promises to get rid of that tangle of wires on our desk and it will allow us to have a wireless headset that works with our cellular phone. We can connect our PDAs to our cellular phone and connect to the Internet and we can synchronize our cellular phone with our desktop and on and on. Unfortunately, Bluetooth synchronizes to the desktop only if you are at the desk--and that's the crux of the problem."<br /><br />Bob sure says "crux" a lot. :lol: This article should spark some interesting debate. I recently installed an <a href="http://www.iogear.com/products/product.php?Item=GBU301">Iogear Bluetooth dongle</a> on my desktop PC, then tried to get my iPAQ 5450 to talk to it, and gave up after 30 minutes. The Iogear product is great, and the iPAQ Bluetooth manager seems intuitive, but it's still too hard, still too illogical. Sigh.

nobody

06-12-2003, 06:36 PM

I recently installed an Iogear Bluetooth dongle on my desktop PC, then tried to get my iPAQ 5450 to talk to it, and gave up after 30 minutes.

Same thing to me. I got a mitsumi usb bluetooth dongle thinking I am all without wire from now on. Bluetooth is still too hard even for die hard techies. Maybe it tries to do too many things at the same time? One good thing at least, I gave up after 2 days. :cry:

pocketpcdude1024

06-12-2003, 06:41 PM

Imagine if PPC2003 has Bluetooth support built-in. For example, in file manager, you could tap & hold and tap "Send via Bluetooth" and select the recieving PPC... :D THAT would be an awesome use of Bluetooth! Besides, has anyone noticed that the new HP models ALL will have Bluetooth...? :wink:

denivan

06-12-2003, 06:45 PM

ricksfiona

06-12-2003, 06:47 PM

My experiences with Bluetooth have been 50/50. To setup devices to talk with each other can be a test of patience. Being a techie for about 20 years... If it's a pain for me to set this up, I can't imagine for someone who isn't a techie.

The manufacturers need to make it easier for devices to see and talk to each other. Plus the quality of Bluetooth tends to vary greatly as well. I bought a Bluetooth headset for my Bluetooth phone and it worked pretty good for a few months, then the static started coming in and it just became useless.

I have a Belkin USB Bluetooth Adapter and it works great! Install the software, plug in the device and it works! Easy to setup with other devices and the range seems to be very good.

James Fee

06-12-2003, 06:53 PM

Part of the problem is that Bluetooth makers have yet to really market the technology. I can't tell you how often I have to explain to users what the difference between the two (WiFi and Bluetooth) technologies are.

On a similar note, I spend all last Sunday at my inlaws house trying to get their new deskjet 995c printer which has bluetooth built into it to work with their desktop. Why can't these things be "plug in and play"? :twak:

Ben

06-12-2003, 06:56 PM

Part of the problem with Bluetooth is that it's designed to work without any sort of base station. Normally when you're connecting wirelessly using 802.11 you're connecting from a client to a base station - the idea of bluetooth is that two individual devices can talk directly to each other without the need for any 'third party'. I know 802.11 can do Ad-hoc mode directly been two cards but my experience of trying to get that to work is simular to what people term 'the bluetooth experince!' (if not worse).

R K

06-12-2003, 06:56 PM

Jason and Nobody: so where have you been having the problems on the BT Dongle?
Have you tried getting any help from forums?
Maybe we can help you out right here.

Johan

06-12-2003, 06:56 PM

Bluetooth is a bit flakey and not simple enough to use. Tried using an USB bluetooth dongle from Wavelinker with the 5450 and I cna it to connect OK and sync but the connection is flakey and the connection is dropped after a short time. Wonder if Activestink has a hand in this.... :twisted:

Wifi is easy as pie and the connection is stable, it rocks to do some cauch-crusing with Thunderhawk and a wifi connection... :clap:

JonnoB

06-12-2003, 06:59 PM

Bluetooth is hard, not intuïtive, but once you get it working it's great...it's cool to be able to sync over bluetooth or install apps without having to put my ipaq in the cradle. What I have discovered though is that BT connection between a PDA and a phone seems to work best, everything else is alot harder to set up, even for power users

The same thing can be done via WiFi (and it is faster)....

BT is a great concept and because it is low-power, a better suited technology to low-bandwidtch connectivity needs. I suspect however that with communication based technology moving more and more to a packet-switched network based on IP (see mobile carriers like Sprint) that the WiFi concept will eventually surpass BT. Although not designed for it originally, IP can accomplish the same tasks of a PAN and just as easily replace wires.

I suspect in the end, BT and the existing WiFi will be replaced by a hybrid protocol that does both better.

surur

06-12-2003, 07:00 PM

Bluetooth is certainly alot of trouble, but its not more trouble than its worth. I hate wires, and would suffer much to get rid of them. Ive got a loox with bluetooth and t68i, and that seems to be a reasonable combination. In about 6 weeks I plan on buying the tom-tom bluetooth GPS receiver and system. I'm also looking forward to getting a bluetooth ear-piece, but have been held back by interoperability problems. I would like for e.g. to use it with my phone and loox for e.g mp3's, but thats not quite there yet.

My main problems with bluetooth is:
Speed - very slow, I only get about 5kb/sec on file transfer.. thats about dial-up speed :(
Poor interoperability e.g MS bluetooth keyboard will only work with MS bluetooth receiver. If that was not the case I would have bought one long ago (because then I could type with a full size keyboard on my loox)
Price- still ads a significant premium to a product

All of these are likely to improve in the future however, and just like USB, this is starting slowly, but will be HUGE in a few years time.

Surur

that_kid

06-12-2003, 07:07 PM

Imagine if PPC2003 has Bluetooth support built-in. For example, in file manager, you could tap & hold and tap "Send via Bluetooth" and select the recieving PPC... :D

That's what I've been waiting for, that option on my desktop and laptop are great. I have a file sitting there waiting to go to my ppc and bam it's there. Now if I could do this with the ppc i'd be somewhat happy. They need to fix some other issues before I can upgrade my happy status to "very happy"

GoldKey

06-12-2003, 07:09 PM

surur

06-12-2003, 07:18 PM

Poor interoperability e.g MS bluetooth keyboard will only work with MS bluetooth receiver. If that was not the case I would have bought one long ago (because then I could type with a full size keyboard on my loox)

Did not know that. Then what is the point of the Bluetooth keyboard over any other wireless keyboard/mouse combo?

None really. Nokia does the same thing with their headset and their phones. Unfortunately only 3rd party providers seem to appreciate interoperability. All the other big companies would like to keep you in their walled garden (which is why there is no universal connection in the PPC world :( )

The main reason I like bluetooth is that, when I upgrade, my peripherals would be easily transferable, which I think is worth the premium in the end.

Surur

David C

06-12-2003, 07:33 PM

Here is an idea. Make BT easier to use by making it hard wire sync once, and wirelessly work forever. Instead of having to push strange buttons at akward intervals, make somekind of hard wire or chip connection that you can plug in to the 2 device you want to sync. Once you have plug the cable between the two, it will recognized the 2 device to be of legal partnership. Then, each usage afterwords can be wireless without having the secruity concerns.

takotchi

06-12-2003, 08:18 PM

I got the Microsoft IntelliMouse Explorer for Bluetooth with my new computer... of course, I was looking forward to a wireless sync with my PocketPC, should I ever get a bluetooth card (BestBuy even had one for $50 at one time, so it's getting cheap).

NOPE.

The receiver included won't work as a serial port, or whatever Microsoft's excuse in tiny, tiny print on the side of the box... so you can't sync with it. You can't do much of anything with it, it only supports a couple different devices... even though it advertises "connect up to 7 other BT devices!"... well, they'll end up being the mouse, the keyboard (if you got that), and about 5 BT headsets or something like that... as if there is any point to that.

(edit)

Also, as somebody already mentioned, you cannot go the other way and use the mouse or keyboard with another receiver; they don't work that way.

Hopefully if all the owners of the BT set or BT mouse prod MS enough, maybe they'll update the receiver to allow for PPC syncing and things like that... that one would EXPECT it to do, since it's just a USB dongle like every other receiver.

heliod

06-12-2003, 08:45 PM

My experience with BT is quite different. I use bluetooth around 9 hours a day almost every day.

I have a Dell Axim with the Socket Card, an MSI BT Dongle that uses the Widcomm stack, an Ericsson R520m BT enabled phone and an Ericsson HBH-15 BT Headset.

- Every day, travelling to work and back, I do my phone calls by dialing from the phone book in the Pocket PC and talking through the headset.

- I get to work and I can sync via Bluetooth. That MSI dongle gets around 70 meters range in my office. From the meeting room I can still browse the Internet through my computer using BT LAN profile.

- When I have Internet presentations, I pair my HBH-15 to the MSI dongle and I have a computer headset.

Setup time was no more than 30 minutes accumulated over all devices (I bought them in different times).

My big disappointment with Bluetooth comes with OBEX. As a technology used, for example, to exchange objects quickly, needing to pair the devices to exchange business cards seems like quite annoying to me... :evil:

freitasm

06-12-2003, 08:48 PM

My main problems with bluetooth is:
Speed - very slow, I only get about 5kb/sec on file transfer.. thats about dial-up speed :(
Poor interoperability e.g MS bluetooth keyboard will only work with MS bluetooth receiver. If that was not the case I would have bought one long ago (because then I could type with a full size keyboard on my loox)
Price- still ads a significant premium to a product

5kb/sec? Where are you trying to copy this file from?

If you're connected to the internet via a mobile phone, the maximum speed will be the lowest speed - in this case the mobile connection (9.6kbps if dial up or 40kbps if GPRS or 50kbps if CDMA). If you're connected to the desktop, make sure you are either using LAN connection or File Transfer. If you're connect via ActiveSync (an error almost everyones does), half of the bandwidth is used to keep cheking the sync is ok, no new records, no changed records etc... ActiveSync is not to be used to share internet over Bluetooth! It works, but it'll be very slow. Check our guides on how to do it via LAN profile...

It's up to the manufacturer to decide what profiles to implement. Microsoft, as always, decided to go the easy way. Their products only work with XP, and only with their receivers :evil:. But the new software versions (I'm using TDK 1.4.2, to be released in a couple of weeks or so), support the HID (Human Interface Devices) profile, and you can then use mouse and keyboard - Logitech, Microsoft, you name it.

Price? Yes, I agree. The chip costs $2.50 and the bast* companies charge you $100 for a headset or $50 more on a PPC.

Regarding Jason problems - give me a call, er, e-mail... I've used Bluetooth for three years now, with Palms, PPCs, laptops, desktops, mobile phones, printers, and never had a problem.

Ad-hoc is a strange concept, when it should exclude things like "pair" and "authorisation". These are the security things required to allow safe use of this technology. Shame it introduces shortcomes. Can you imagine if you walk down the street and anyone could use your mobile to connect to the internet? This kind of stuff is needed.

I went to a conference and scanned with my H3970... Found three mobiles accepting connections!

mobile

06-12-2003, 09:00 PM

Maybe if MS actually implemented a well functioning BT protocol stack with the most common profiles in it BT wouldn't be so hard for people to use. I've used several BT products on nearly all Windows OS versions, and yes, sometimes it's more of a hassle than you'd expect to get it installed correctly. However, if companies adhered to the set of standard specs within BT, very much in the same way that they tend to adhere to the 801.11b/g specs, then maybe BT would work well for everyone.

One good example of BT really working is Apple. OK, so I'm swearing in church here, but still. Got my girlfriend a BT dongle (D-Link) for her Mac and T68. She was up and running, synchronized and everything in 5 MINUTES!!! Maybe MS should follow the good example. As for synchronization, this is another main point. MS, as usual, want to go their own way. What's wrong with using standards? It has a magical tendency to work really well if you adhere to them ... or maybe it's not so magical after all. SyncML works just fine for everyone else. Since I read a lot of complaints about ActiveSync, perhaps SyncML would remedy some or all of the problems that PPC people have with ActiveSync since it seems to work magic ...

In the debate around 802.11 and BT ... oh, I get so tired ... Why can't people, and especially so-called analysts and journalists, just get the simplest facts down? I encourage people to read the specs (not down to protocol level, of course), understand networking in terms of WAN, LAN, and PAN, and suddenly the benefits of 802.11 and BT (NOT vs.) are not all that hard to understand.

For example, in your car, driving along I-5 between San Francisco and Los Angeles (for those of you not familiar with the area - it's about 5 hours on a road with no major cities between SF and LA), how well do you think 802.11 will work? Yupp, you're right - the answer is obvious - not so well at all. Or just walking down the street with your PDA connected via BT to your phone. Nope, 802.11 wouldn't do that very well either. And yes, while I'm at it, that kind of kills of the "WLAN will overtake 3G" debate as well. BT on the other hand would work just fine, connecting your phone to your laptop/PDA.

In other scenarios, i.e. in more stationary environments, 802.11 rocks. Why put up a BT network at home? Sure, I have one of those too, but not for networking in a LAN environment. I love my 802.11 network to death for what it does for me - which is Local Area Networking, NOT Personal Area Networking.

See, there's a place and use for everything. Don't dis technology, use it to your favor!

And if you don't like, don't use it. Someone else will use it instead of you, and maybe for what it was intended to be used for.

Oh well, lengthy post. Just had to get it off my chest.

/// Mobile

disconnected

06-12-2003, 09:05 PM

I've had my iPAQ 3975 for almost a year and, until a few weeks ago, never had occasion to use bluetooth (Sprint's bluetooth phone remaining a fantasy).

I just bought a bluetooth GPS receiver, and was afraid it would be complicated to set up the connection (still remembering connection mangler nightmares), but it was miraculous. I turned on bluetooth in the GPS receiver and turned on the bluetooth radio of the iPAQ, and it immediately found the GPS receiver and asked if I wanted to bond the device.

I did have to search a forum in GPSPassion to see what to specify for COM port and Baud Rate in Mapopolis, but after that everything worked perfectly.

One kind of annoying thing is that Microsoft Streets and Trips apparently can't be used with a bluetooth GPS receiver because it doesn't allow the necessary COM ports. Someone on a forum suggested that you might be able to disable some COM ports, thus somehow causing bluetooth to use a COM port allowed in Streets and Trips, but I'm not brave enough to try that.

ericdo

06-12-2003, 09:25 PM

Great post heliod

I use Bluetooth on a day to day basis. Yesterday I bought my 6th Bluetooth device
iPaq 3870
Nokia 6310
Crappy Headset thing
Mitsumi Bluetooth Dongle
Socket Bluetooth GPS
Sony Ericsson T610

My personal belief is that certain of the devices are poor. In particular the Mitsumi Bluetooth Dongle. I'm always having problems connecting devies to my PC. The 6310 was also very poor, requiring proprietary Bluetooth dongles before syncing to the PC.

The GPS unit and the T610 are awesome no problems connectig to my iPaq.

For Bluetooth to succeed the connectivity has to be painless and easy to set up. What a great job Socket/Emtac and Sony Ericsson have done.

Very importantly - WiFi and Bluetooth are different. It's crazy that people continually compare them. They have different purposes.

My 2c

denivan

06-12-2003, 10:26 PM

I have a Dell Axim with the Socket Card, an MSI BT Dongle that uses the Widcomm stack, From the meeting room I can still browse the Internet through my computer using BT LAN profile.

Can I contact you by PM or E-mail ? I've got an old ipaq with Socketcom Card and an Anycom BT Dongle that uses the same Widcomm stack. I can use it to do an Activesync, but BT Lan never seems to work. I suppose it has something to do that this PC is a client connected to another server and that the BT Lan needs the BT "server" pc to have a certain IP. Anyway, if you could take the time out for some quick troubleshooting, I'd be very happy.

Kind regards,

Ivan

denivan

06-12-2003, 10:43 PM

Someone on a forum suggested that you might be able to disable some COM ports, thus somehow causing bluetooth to use a COM port allowed in Streets and Trips, but I'm not brave enough to try that.

With the Socketcom bluetooth software it's pretty easy to free up COM ports. Every BT service uses a port, so if you don't need BT printing or faxing or whatever, just disable it. The software even lets you disable IrDA if you need the necessary COM ports. I'm not sure how the native Bluetooth software works on a 3970 but I would be surprised if it wouldn't be as straightforward as it is with the Socketcom software. So, try it, you're braver than you think you are :)

freitasm

06-12-2003, 11:24 PM

Can I contact you by PM or E-mail ? I've got an old ipaq with Socketcom Card and an Anycom BT Dongle that uses the same Widcomm stack. I can use it to do an Activesync, but BT Lan never seems to work. I suppose it has something to do that this PC is a client connected to another server and that the BT Lan needs the BT "server" pc to have a certain IP. Anyway, if you could take the time out for some quick troubleshooting, I'd be very happy.

Kind regards,

Ivan

There's no need for a certain IP in the BT server. The BT virtual adapter needs to be 192.168.0.1, because ICS needs it like this. But you don't have to use ICS, Winroute will do just as well, and it's more flexible with numbers.

Have a look in for Geekzone (http://www.geekzone.co.nz) for a list of items to check if LAN access doesn't work...

hollis_f

06-13-2003, 07:22 AM

Bluetooth is hard, not intuïtive, but once you get it working it's great...it's cool to be able to sync over bluetooth or install apps without having to put my ipaq in the cradle. What I have discovered though is that BT connection between a PDA and a phone seems to work best, everything else is alot harder to set up, even for power users

The same thing can be done via WiFi (and it is faster)....
Yeah! Cool!

Can you tell me where I can get a WiFi enabled phone? I like being able to get online wherever I am. In the UK that's almost possible with GPRS via the GSM network (there are a few places with no signal, mainly rural, mountainous areas). That makes the PPC-BT-GPRS method the fastest (if you include the 2.5 hours it takes to get to the nearest WiFi hotspot).

hollis_f

06-13-2003, 07:33 AM

"I recently installed an Iogear Bluetooth dongle (http://www.iogear.com/products/product.php?Item=GBU301) on my desktop PC, then tried to get my iPAQ 5450 to talk to it, and gave up after 30 minutes. The Iogear product is great, and the iPAQ Bluetooth manager seems intuitive, but it's still too hard, still too illogical. Sigh.Er, I'm confused. The Iogear product 'is great' - but it doesn't work! This must be some strange, new, usage of the word 'great' that I have not previously encountered :wink:

I read a lot of people slagging off BT - and almost all of them have tried one or two crappy implementations and tarred the whole technology with that brush. It is unfortunate that some of the real big players - Nokia, Microsoft, Sony - have released BT devices that either work in a non-standard manner or do not have a decent complement of BT profiles to be able to be used properly.

Try using a 397x or 54xx with a TDK BT adaptor. Or using either of the iPAQs with a Sony-Ericsson Txx phone. Or an iPAQ with an Emtac GPS. All were simple to set up and work flawlessly.

If I'd stuck with my first attempts at using BT (Nokia 6210, Nokia CF, FSC Loox) I would have just the same opinion of BT - utter crap. Luckily I found that it was these companies that were crap, not the technology.

freitasm

06-13-2003, 08:27 AM

My main problems with bluetooth is:
Speed - very slow, I only get about 5kb/sec on file transfer.. thats about dial-up speed :(
Surur

Surur, just a quick note... I've installed another BT device in my network (yep, heaps of these here), and I'm copying a file over. My speed is around 40 - 50kb/sec:
http://www.geekzone.co.nz/images/forums/bluetoothcopy.jpg

Also, this new device uses an updated driver (1.3), and my desktop is running a beta (1.4). Another device running 1.2 was slow compared to this one too...

As hollis_f said, GPRS is almost everywhere here too (New Zealand), so you can connect with your mobile anywhere and anytime. We do have public wi-fi hotspots - but you have to go close to use. With a mobile and Bluetooth you can connect anywhere... And I agree - flaky companies, not the concept.

disconnected

06-13-2003, 05:02 PM

denivan,

Not only am I a coward, but I can't actually find anywhere on the iPAQ that tells me anything about COM ports, never mind how to disable any. :?

surur

06-13-2003, 06:59 PM

My main problems with bluetooth is:
Speed - very slow, I only get about 5kb/sec on file transfer.. thats about dial-up speed :(
Surur

Surur, just a quick note... I've installed another BT device in my network (yep, heaps of these here), and I'm copying a file over. My speed is around 40 - 50kb/sec:
http://www.geekzone.co.nz/images/forums/bluetoothcopy.jpg

Also, this new device uses an updated driver (1.3), and my desktop is running a beta (1.4). Another device running 1.2 was slow compared to this one too...

I was inspired to try again. I am running the tecom/broadcom/widdcom 1.2.2.16 diver (where do I get the 1.4 beta?) and managed to transfer a 3mb MP3 to my loox in about 5 minutes. That gives a rate of about 10 kb/ sec. Better, but still not a rate you could stream MP3's with. I sure hope it is just my implementation, because then there is some hope for future improvement.

Surur

Tom_Gilheany

06-13-2003, 07:40 PM

Actually, I don't believe that Bluetooth competes against WiFi.

The easy explanation is that WiFI is a wireless equivalent of Ethernet LAN.
Bluetooth is more like the wireless version of USB - It is designed to eliminate cable clutter and simplify the desktop.

If you think of it this way, it explains a great deal.
USB hasn't replaced Ethernet 10-Base-T, but that's not what it was trying to do -- they have grown to complement one another.

Of course you can do some LAN-like things with Bluetooth, but you can with USB as well.

The way I see it, there are three primary problems with Bluetooth, as it stands now: Bluetooth (unlike USB) has dozens of "profiles" that each emulate a sort-of virtual cable type. (An example is "Headset" profile, or "PAN Networking" profile). Each type of service (like a headset) requires the service profile to exist on both devices (i.e. both PDA and earphone must support the "headset" profile, or you can't virtually plug them into each other). Unfortunately, various devices and PC-dongles don't always support the profiles that you would need or expect. Product packaging very frequently doesn't mention which profiles are supported. This is a reason why you see so many returned PC-dongles -- A user was expecting to use it with a Jabra headset for example, until they found out the dongle they bought doesn't support the headset profile.

Second item that needs to be fixed is software applications. Currently most bluetooth software fars fall short of the "10-minutes out of the box" experience that the Bluetooth organization is looking for. Troubleshooting a new device requires far too much technical expertise for the average Joe. More work needs to be done in the Plug-and-Play department and in the product setup wizards in order to make this technology more user friendly to the average person.

Additional thought needs to be put in to products in order to meet user expectations. I recently tried to sync contacts between my bluetooth-dongle equipped PC and my bluetooth phone, using a sync program supplied by the phone manufacturer. Even though both devices supported the "Serial data" profile, the Contact Sync program would not work because it required the Serial port to show up as COM1 or COM2 instead of the COM6-7 that my PC placed it on. Result: I had to purchase a specialized $50 cable for my WIRELESS bluetooth-enabled phone! I have high hopes that manufacturers will address these issues as they begin to incorporate the Bluetooth 1.2 standard. There is precedence here, as anyone who was around during the pre-Plug&Play USB 1.0 days can recall.
[And for those of you who can't -- getting early USB devices working on Windows 95 was very like the bluetooth experience now].

-->Tom

freitasm

06-14-2003, 12:03 AM

I was inspired to try again. I am running the tecom/broadcom/widdcom 1.2.2.16 diver (where do I get the 1.4 beta?) and managed to transfer a 3mb MP3 to my loox in about 5 minutes. That gives a rate of about 10 kb/ sec. Better, but still not a rate you could stream MP3's with. I sure hope it is just my implementation, because then there is some hope for future improvement.
Surur

Surur, that's why some Bluetooth products cost more than others. Bluetake sent me a box full of Bluetooth goodies to try and giveaway (yes, look in Geekzone in the next few weeks!), and their CD comes with the latest (1.3) released version. This is the one I've got the screenshot from, and I'm happy with this product.

TDK always releases the new versions first (my 1.4 comes from them, since I use a TDK at home). They put lots of money in testing, making sure it works, and distributing the new versions ASAP. That's why it costs more. I've got the beta version to test a home, but it's not official until the Bluetooth World Congress this month.

I've visited the Tecom website, and the download section for Bluetooth is... empty :evil:

It doesn't mean their product is not good. They use the same chipset as TDK, and the same software. It's just that their support policy is not good.

I'd ditch some brands and go for TDK, Bluetake, Belkin and Socket.