Advantages and Limitations of Bluetooth

Although many people may have heard the word “Bluetooth” bantered about, they may be unfamiliar with the technology. We will be taking a look at a few of the specifics of Bluetooth as well as some of the disadvantages or considerations.

Bluetooth has a lot to offer with an increasingly difficult market place. Bluetooth helps to bring with it the promise of freedom from the cables and simplicity in networking that has yet to be matched by LAN (Local Area Network).

In the key marketplace, of wireless and handheld devices, the closest competitor to Bluetooth is infrared. Infrared holds many key features, although the line of sight it provides doesn’t go through walls or through obstacles like that of the Bluetooth technology.

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.

Although possessing many positive features, given the current competition you might be hard pressed to find the downsides to Bluetooth. The issues of rate and security are the only real disadvantages to Bluetooth. Whereas infrared boasts data rates of up to 4 MBps providing for very fast rates of data transfer, Bluetooth can only provide 1 MBps.

Because of the data transfer rate of infrared over Bluetooth, infrared is considered by many folks to be a technology that remains complimentary to Bluetooth. Also, infrared is considered to be more secure than Bluetooth due to its line of sight constraints.

With Bluetooth having greater range and using radio frequency, it is more susceptible to interception and attacks from outside. Given 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.

Debbie Parkinson is a free lance writer whose favorite pastimes are things technology related. Have you exhausted the USB ports needed to plug in your many peripheral devices? Solve your USB port deficiencies by learning more about the 7 Port USB Hub. The 7 Port USB Hub will provide you with all the USB ports you need for your printer, camera, flash drive, and just about anything else requiring a USB port.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 3rd, 2010 at 8:48 pm and is filed under Cellphones. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.