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Somewhere on HN in a similar discussion a bluetooth stack engineer showed up and explained that the entire bluetooth comms stack is a Rube Goldberg house of hor

Somewhere on HN in a similar discussion a bluetooth stack engineer showed up and explained that the entire bluetooth comms stack is a Rube Goldberg house of horrors, so this really no surprise. And then there are the bufferbloat people who finally tracked down the fact that in various common situations, the normal Wi-Fi protocol has a nasty interaction where it self-degrades to ridiculously slow speeds, and will take 2-5 MINUTES to recover. We just don't have enough people doing serious whole-stack hardware+software analysis on our wireless stuff. At least outside of cellular telephony - probably because the money is more concentrated there.

mzakharo1 6y ago
Are you talking about this? https://www.bufferbloat.net/projects/bloat/wiki/What_can_I_do_about_Bufferbloat/ https://www.bufferbloat.net/projects/bloat/wiki/What_can_I_d... P.S. SFQ is enabled part of QoS (on my asus86u). There are enough people working on WiFi, you just have to invest money/time to buy/configure proper AP hardware. In cellular, AP is managed by a team of engineers, and in consumer WiFi space, it is a race to the bottom.
- grandinj 6y ago
  https://www.bufferbloat.net/projects/make-wifi-fast/wiki/ https://www.bufferbloat.net/projects/make-wifi-fast/wiki/ and jim gettys blog https://gettys.wordpress.com/ https://gettys.wordpress.com/ are good places to start
rkangel 6y ago
I maintained a commercial Bluetooth stack for several years. My opinion is that the stack is actually not too bad (although Low Energy complicated it). The problem is that it has to be all things to all people. There's discussions about codecs elsewhere on here - quality, latency etc. There is a lowest common denominator so that everything works for everyone but the information as to whether you're getting something else is hidden, both at purchase time and run time. Two things that would help: Manufacturers actually putting supported codecs somewhere in the purchase information. Why does tech specs on my Bose QuietComfort not have that information anywhere? If you Google you can eventually find a support question and answer. Exposing runtime negotiation results to the user. In Windows when I'm connected to Wifi it shows signal strength and other basic info via the icon in the taskbar. When I'm connected to Bluetooth why is there not a display listing the profiles and codecs in use ("High Quality Audio mode via Aptx Low Latency", "Headset mode" etc.). We actually need something similar for USB now as it has the same problem as Bluetooth - one transmission medium for a whole lot of different things all of which have to be able to negotiate to a common denominator. It happens a little bit with just the charging component (phone lets you know it's charging slowly if the charger can't negotiate up enough) - why isn't similar information provided somewhere for the rest of the USB features ("Connected to device X, can't enable feature Y as cable doesn't do Z").
- grandinj 6y ago
  That's great for techies like us, but terrible for the 1000x more people who want stuff to "just work". As an example, Windows partially exposes that with my current setup and it's a right pain, when some apps (e.g. Zoom) decide they preferentially want to use some other bluetooth codec than the one I actually chose. Most people really just want one thing which says "headphones" and for the software/hardware to Just Work.
  - camehere2saydis 6y ago
    Maybe most people are wrong after all. There's all this talk of ethics and of logical fallacies that's making the rounds, and then you have this failure to realize that non-techies are conditioned to see technology as some sort of black magic that you have to be a special kind of not-quite-person in order to be able to make sense of. No matter what spin you put on it, life in our society is not simple. Any kind of tool tends to work better if you're using it with some degree of understanding how it works. If only our industry would somehow magically stop enabling entitlement and complacency (and make it easier for users to "do their homework")... then maybe things would actually "just work" much more often.
    - kyralis 6y ago
      You're missing the actual logical result of life in our society not being simple: people do not have enough time or available energy given the rest of the demands on their life. Civilization has evolved toward specialization, and the basic expectation of specialization is that the output of specialists is useful to individuals in other specialties. It is foolish to expect or require everyone to become an expert on bluetooth configuration options to have some headphones that don't work or a mouse without latency spikes. This isn't entitlement; this is efficiency and the way society is expected to function. It is a very long time since we have expected everyone in our society to be an expert at everything.
      - xg15 6y ago
        Good point - however, then at least have an option for specialists to get access to the info. I also believe we haven't yet explored all options to make certain "specialist" topics more accessible to the general public. E.g., I'm continually surprised how much the actual network traffic between apps/devices and their corresponding servers is hidden. I believe a simple visualisation about what apps/devices are talking with who would do a lot to at least get some basic understanding of what's going on. People seems to be very capable of learning concepts if they see personal relevance - e.g. teens know very well what the battery, wifi and signal strength indicators on their phones mean.
WrtCdEvrydy 6y ago
Most off-to-the-shelf Bluetooth stacks are pretty terrible... the only reason ours was decent was become we built it from stack before Bluetooth was so pre-dominant. Ours had some issues because we were behind the spec (the guys at the top only wanted the features that supported the spec, no cutting corners, no pretending the features worked, it had to work correctly) Source: Worked Radio Verification at a mobile company that developed it's own bluetooth stack. RIP Blackberry.
joenot443 6y ago
Does anyone have a link for this Rube Goldberg house of horrors? Sounds terribly interesting.

mzakharo1 6y ago

Are you talking about this? https://www.bufferbloat.net/projects/bloat/wiki/What_can_I_do_about_Bufferbloat/ https://www.bufferbloat.net/projects/bloat/wiki/What_can_I_d... P.S. SFQ is enabled part of QoS (on my asus86u). There are enough people working on WiFi, you just have to invest money/time to buy/configure proper AP hardware. In cellular, AP is managed by a team of engineers, and in consumer WiFi space, it is a race to the bottom.

grandinj 6y ago
https://www.bufferbloat.net/projects/make-wifi-fast/wiki/ https://www.bufferbloat.net/projects/make-wifi-fast/wiki/ and jim gettys blog https://gettys.wordpress.com/ https://gettys.wordpress.com/ are good places to start

rkangel 6y ago

I maintained a commercial Bluetooth stack for several years. My opinion is that the stack is actually not too bad (although Low Energy complicated it). The problem is that it has to be all things to all people. There's discussions about codecs elsewhere on here - quality, latency etc. There is a lowest common denominator so that everything works for everyone but the information as to whether you're getting something else is hidden, both at purchase time and run time. Two things that would help: Manufacturers actually putting supported codecs somewhere in the purchase information. Why does tech specs on my Bose QuietComfort not have that information anywhere? If you Google you can eventually find a support question and answer. Exposing runtime negotiation results to the user. In Windows when I'm connected to Wifi it shows signal strength and other basic info via the icon in the taskbar. When I'm connected to Bluetooth why is there not a display listing the profiles and codecs in use ("High Quality Audio mode via Aptx Low Latency", "Headset mode" etc.). We actually need something similar for USB now as it has the same problem as Bluetooth - one transmission medium for a whole lot of different things all of which have to be able to negotiate to a common denominator. It happens a little bit with just the charging component (phone lets you know it's charging slowly if the charger can't negotiate up enough) - why isn't similar information provided somewhere for the rest of the USB features ("Connected to device X, can't enable feature Y as cable doesn't do Z").

grandinj 6y ago
That's great for techies like us, but terrible for the 1000x more people who want stuff to "just work". As an example, Windows partially exposes that with my current setup and it's a right pain, when some apps (e.g. Zoom) decide they preferentially want to use some other bluetooth codec than the one I actually chose. Most people really just want one thing which says "headphones" and for the software/hardware to Just Work.
- camehere2saydis 6y ago
  Maybe most people are wrong after all. There's all this talk of ethics and of logical fallacies that's making the rounds, and then you have this failure to realize that non-techies are conditioned to see technology as some sort of black magic that you have to be a special kind of not-quite-person in order to be able to make sense of. No matter what spin you put on it, life in our society is not simple. Any kind of tool tends to work better if you're using it with some degree of understanding how it works. If only our industry would somehow magically stop enabling entitlement and complacency (and make it easier for users to "do their homework")... then maybe things would actually "just work" much more often.
  - kyralis 6y ago
    You're missing the actual logical result of life in our society not being simple: people do not have enough time or available energy given the rest of the demands on their life. Civilization has evolved toward specialization, and the basic expectation of specialization is that the output of specialists is useful to individuals in other specialties. It is foolish to expect or require everyone to become an expert on bluetooth configuration options to have some headphones that don't work or a mouse without latency spikes. This isn't entitlement; this is efficiency and the way society is expected to function. It is a very long time since we have expected everyone in our society to be an expert at everything.
    - xg15 6y ago
      Good point - however, then at least have an option for specialists to get access to the info. I also believe we haven't yet explored all options to make certain "specialist" topics more accessible to the general public. E.g., I'm continually surprised how much the actual network traffic between apps/devices and their corresponding servers is hidden. I believe a simple visualisation about what apps/devices are talking with who would do a lot to at least get some basic understanding of what's going on. People seems to be very capable of learning concepts if they see personal relevance - e.g. teens know very well what the battery, wifi and signal strength indicators on their phones mean.

WrtCdEvrydy 6y ago

Most off-to-the-shelf Bluetooth stacks are pretty terrible... the only reason ours was decent was become we built it from stack before Bluetooth was so pre-dominant. Ours had some issues because we were behind the spec (the guys at the top only wanted the features that supported the spec, no cutting corners, no pretending the features worked, it had to work correctly) Source: Worked Radio Verification at a mobile company that developed it's own bluetooth stack. RIP Blackberry.

joenot443 6y ago

Does anyone have a link for this Rube Goldberg house of horrors? Sounds terribly interesting.