[NBLUG TALK] Bluetooth & 802.11b

Rob Flickenger rob at oreillynet.com
Fri Mar 16 11:37:05 PST 2001



On Fri, 16 Mar 2001, Dustin Mollo wrote:

> Read this rather intersting story today in this weeks InfoWorld.  It talks
> about how Bluetooth and 802.11b truly aren't friendly at all in the space
> physical space.
>
> http://www.infoworld.com/articles/op/xml/01/03/12/010312opwireless.xml

Fascinating (altho slightly speculative...)

Yet another reason why BlueTooth is a bad idea waiting to happen.  I'm
fascinated by the hooting and hollering against 802.11b (interference on
the band, low speed compared to 802.11a / .16, BlueTooth
incompatibility, no signal in water vapor...)

Speaking of a signal-to-noise problem, I think there's more noise coming
from the people than there is in the spectrum.

BlueTooth is a nice concept, but isn't here yet.  Same with 802.11a /
802.16 / WirelessHUMAN.  Sure, I'd love to have peripherals with no wires
and 56Mbit lan connections...  But the fact remains that no matter how much
I want to, I can't right now.  The hardware simply isn't ready, and I'm not
willing to wait.

Especially when we have a really cool tech that largely does what I want it
to...  As far as the noise and fog issues go, my direct experience has been
that, given the proper antennas, 802.11b cuts through rain and fog as if it
weren't there at all (I haven't had the chance to try it through snow
yet...  ;)

And as it uses DSSS, it's tremendously robust in dealing with noise in the
band.  I'm getting an article together for oreillynet that gives some
benchmarks using the Lucent hardware, but here's the gist:  Unless there's
a microwave oven on directly in the path between you and your router, the
interference is negligible.  As the hardware can pick the best channel and
automatically retransmits (at the hardware layer, long before IP) you see
a tiny bit of slowdown in throughput, without any additional processing
overhead.

Anyway, enough ranting.  Just don't believe da hype-- try 802.11b.  You'll
like it!

--Rob




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