Advantages and Disadvantages of Bluetooth Technology

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 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.

When it comes to the marketplace of handheld and wireless devices, infrared is the nearest competitor to Bluetooth. Infrared, although possessing many key features, is line of sight and therefor cannot operate through walls or other obstacles like that of Bluetooth.

As just mentioned, Bluetooth, unlike infrared, doesn’t need line of sight and is capable of ranges upwards of 100 meters, or about 328 feet. Bluetooth is also what’s called low power and low processing having an overhead protocol. Simply put, this indicates that Bluetooth is perfect for integration into smaller devices that are battery powered. To sum it up, Bluetooth applications are practically limitless.

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.

The greater range and radio frequency (RF) of Bluetooth make it much more open to interception and attack. For this reason, 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.

Debbie Parkinson is a free lance writer whose favorite pastimes are things technology related. Maybe you have run out of USB ports necessary 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.