Friday, January 29, 2010

Advantages and Disadvantages of Bluetooth Technology

By Debbie Parkinson

I am sure that most folks have heard of the term "Bluetooth" but may not have any idea what exactly it is. We will be discussing a few of the advantages as well as limitations of Bluetooth in this article.

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.

Unlike infrared, Bluetooth isn't a line of sight and it provides ranges of up to 100 meters. Bluetooth is also low power and low processing with an overhead protocol. What this means, is that it's ideal for integration into small battery powered devices. To put it short, the applications with Bluetooth are virtually endless.

Disadvantages Bluetooth has several positive features and one would be extremely hard pressed to find downsides when given the current competition. The only real downsides are the data rate and security. Infrared can have data rates of up to 4 MBps, which provides very fast rates for data transfer, while Bluetooth only offers 1 MBps.

This advantage of infrared over Bluetooth has made infrared a complimentary technology to Bluetooth and is one reason why it is still being used. Another issue has to deal with increased security as a result of infrared only being used line of sight.

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.

Even given the few disadvantages we have mentioned above, when it comes to short range, wireless technology, Bluetooth still remains the best. The folks who have tried Bluetooth love this technology and realize that Bluetooth will be around for the long haul. - 22787

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