Tuesday, February 2, 2010

BlueTooth - Advantages and Limitations

By Debbie Parkinson

Most folks may have heard of the term "Bluetooth" but are not quite sure what it is or what the technology is all about. In this article we will be discussing the advantages and disadvantages of Bluetooth technology.

Bluetooth offers a lot in a marketplace that is becoming increasingly competitive. This Bluetooth technology helps provide you the freedom from cables and networking simplicity not found in the Local Area Network.

Infrared is the closest competitor to Bluetooth in the marketplace of handheld and wireless devices. Although infrared has many distinct and important features, it is limited to line of sight and will not work behind walls or other through other obstacles - Bluetooth can.

Bluetooth can give you ranges of up to about 328 feet or 100 meters and is not constrained by line of sight as is infrared. Bluetooth is also low power and low processing with an overhead protocol. Bluetooth is ideal when it comes to integrating it into small battery operated devices. This enables Bluetooth to be used in a virtually endless number of applications.

Even though you will find that Bluetooth has many advantageous attributes and given the current competition, finding a downside to Bluetooth might be hard to do, there are a few disadvantages. The issues of data rate and security are the only real concerns. Bluetooth can only provide data transfer rates of only 1 MBps whereas infrared has very fast data transfer rates of up to 4 MBps.

For this very reason, infrared has yet to be dispensed with completely and is considered by many to be the complimentary technology to that of Bluetooth. Infrared has inherent security due to its line of sight.

Because of the greater range and use of radio frequency by Bluetooth, this technology is more open to attack and interception. Because of this, security is a very key aspect to the Bluetooth specification.

Although there are very few disadvantages, Bluetooth still remains the best for short range wireless technology. Those who have tried it love it, and they know for a fact that Bluetooth will be around for years to come.

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