wireless through walls, whats the effect?

[solus]

My computer is in a room thats kind of in the middle of the house, towards the front though. I'm trying to figure out if bluetooth would be a good alternative to 802.11b (less expensive, as all I need is one USB adapter for ~50 bucks w/ the 2210). The belkin advertises 100meters, but how well does this hold up between walls. I've heard that walls greatly interfere with bluetooth signal. Vs. 802.11 which does not b/c its range is so huge that it really doesn't matter. Any help would be appreciated.

Also, on the PDA i plan to do file sharing (streaming and transfering mp3s & movies from my desktop, docs, etc) and surf the web via ICS (bluetooth) or a wireless router (802.11b).

[Abba Zabba]

Your best bet if you plan on doing file sharing and streaming would be to use 802.1x. Bluetooth isn't near as fast as Wifi and you'll also get bettter range as well :)

[tato68]

Wifi is better. You can also download to yor PPC from the Desktop via Wifi.

Later...

[CoreyJF]

If you look for sales you can get wifi equipment pretty cheap. Bluetooth can do networking, but it was not designed for it.

[solus]

I found a great router for ~57 bucks (netgear MR814). However, I'm wanting to get a quality CF card - the low power drain on the Socket is extremely tempting. Ambicom has the freeze issue w/ IE. Otherwise I'd get it.

[Sven Johannsen]

WiFi and BT both operate in the 2.4 GHz band. The attentuation of radio waves through various mediums, air, walls, people, is dependent on the frequency. BT and WiFi therefore suffer the same relative attenuation. WiFi generally starts out with more power though, so it will have more usable power at any given distance, or through given objects.

On the otherhand, wideband signals (WiFi) tend to degrade faster than narrowband signals (BT) so their range is limited by that natural phenomena. This can, of course, by mitigated by receiver design and modulation techniques.

At this point, if you want a pleasant user experience, I'd go with WiFi. BT still seems to need to much futzing to get it to work as reliably and easily as WiFi.