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Wi-LE: Can WiFi replace Bluetooth? (2019) [pdf]
- bombcar 6y agoWhat I’d love to see is my Mac be able to connect my Zoom or Teams meetings to my AirPods via my iPhone (on wifi) so that I can freely run to the kitchen without losing Bluetooth connection.
- nick_ 6y agoThe Teams iOS app does audio hand-off really well in my experience. Have you tried that?
- bombcar 6y agoI haven't - but I want to use my desktop for the camera and viewing shared screen as much as possible, I just don't like missing something if I have to step away. As it is my Airpods ALMOST reach to the kitchen, just as I open the fridge they disconnect. And they don't reconnect until I'm very close (though I suspect this is because they decide to connect to my phone). Now that I think about it I should just join the meetings twice ...
- meepmorp 6y agoGet a mini fridge for your office
- rubidium 6y agoTeams does this. Join call from phone. Then join from computer. Computer will ask if transfer or join w/o audio. Choose join w/o audio. Best way to be on calls. Need to walk around no problem. But can still see full screen when desired. Also can work if your home internet is spotty and you transfer to phones internet service.
- johnwalkr 6y agoI just always use my phone for zoom instead of my MacBook. About the only feature I like of MS Teams, is the ability to switch devices easily. It only works for scheduled meetings, not calls though.
- culopatin 6y agoTangential, but I am amazed by the Bluetooth range I get out of my AirPod pro and iPhone 12. What the hell are they doing? My laptop doesn’t even get to 1/4 of the range. I’ve walked into a vault (like a bank vault) with my phone outside of it, and the music never stopped. I’ve walked a good 20ft and everything was still smooth.
- bad_username 6y agoYour music had probably been buffered.
- bad_username 6y agoAnd I just said a silly thing. It's Bluetooth, not Wifi we are talking about.
- BuckRogers 6y agoWhat other quality Bluetooth devices do you have or have you used? While Airpods and iPhones work excellently (I have both the gen2 Airpods and iPhone 12 mini), my Sony XM4s also have great range with my Windows desktop.
- culopatin 6y agoI’m comparing the same AirPods between iPhone and my Thinkpad and I can’t get the same range. Unfortunately the only other Bluetooth device I have is my aftermarket ECU in my Miata and there is no iPhone app to connect to that one.
- sodality2 6y agoI hope so. I have issues with BT about once every time I use it.
- the_only_law 6y agoI’ve heard multiple times that apparently a lot of proprietary Bluetooth stacks are filled to the brim with bugs. I’m not sure how complex the Bluetooth spec is but I wouldn’t be surprised if it were true. It’s also part of why I can’t stand the trend of remove the headphone jack from devices.
- jjoonathan 6y agoI've read chunks of the bluetooth spec and while I didn't wind up spending very long actually using it, the vibe I got was that of a committee composed of architecture astronauts who pumped out pages by the truckload and applications engineers who could never agree on anything. The standard is very heavy on abstract cruft and very light on constraining decisions, which is probably why 30 years later we still have pairing issues with headphones.
- lostlogin 6y agoOh but the next version has fixed that, uses less energy and is going to be great, as per every Bluetooth press release every single year.
- krastanov 6y agoBLE actually fixed that and it uses less energy. I have used it both on desktops and on embedded devices, in C and in scripted languages, and it has been a pleasure.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- Gibbon1 6y agoThe original design was utterly terrible. A low data rate frequency hopper with long packets. Which meant the RF performance was terrible and non state of the art. By design. I think they thought spec'ing low data rate frequency hopper meant automatically low cost, low power. They messed up the low power part by spec'ing a complicated baseband that had everything but the kitchen sink. Basically duplicated the USB spec but then added authentication and encryption on top of it. Which is even more complicated because everything runs over a unreliable frequency hopping rf channel. Frequency hopping messes with a lot of things.
- TehCorwiz 6y agoYes, or, at least it has been used to do so. Microsoft's xbox 360/xbox one USB controller adapter is actually a standard wifi adapter with a custom firmware. Source: https://github.com/medusalix/xow#how-it-works https://github.com/medusalix/xow#how-it-works
- Causality1 6y agoThat's due to range and especially latency issues with Bluetooth. It's one reason competitive shooters were more popular on the 360 than the Ps3 with its Bluetooth gamepad.
- SkyPuncher 6y ago> . It's one reason competitive shooters were more popular on the 360 than the Ps3 with its Bluetooth gamepad. I played a LOT of Call of Duty and PS3. I never noticed input latency issues. I think shooters where more popular on XBox because Halo took over a ton of the initial market share.
- Godel_unicode 6y agoThere's been extensive study into the latency difference between 360 controllers and ps3 controllers. There is virtually none and it's definitely not noticeable with all the other latency sources in the signal chain. Edit: one public, easy to digest source https://www.reddit.com/r/RocketLeague/comments/8wvf9u/controller_input_lag_comparison_more_info_in_the/ https://www.reddit.com/r/RocketLeague/comments/8wvf9u/contro...
- Causality1 6y agoThat's on a PC. I'm not saying console results aren't similar but they aren't necessarily the same. Regardless, it was the common perception at the time and thus affected the behavior of players.
- Godel_unicode 6y agoYou might be surprised to discover that the radio waves don't care if they're going to a desktop PC in a traditional case, or a slightly different desktop PC in a Microsoft/Sony case! It was not "the common perception". At best it was common among your peer group?
- callesgg 6y agoI can see a reason to abandon BLE. Bluetooth is generally a bit problematic maybe due to is complexity. but “Bluetooth low energy” is perfect for what it is (a super slow short range wireless communication implementation).
- SV_BubbleTime 6y agoThe problem with BLE is they make huge Bluetooth standards but forget the things people will actually want. Their first revision was 20-23 byte packets. The first thing anyone looks for when doing BLE is “how to send larger data”. BLE 4.2 and packet length extension helped this but it’s still pretty rough because you aren’t promised any specific MTU size by spec, just hope you can the packet size you need on connection. I have a BLE product in the wild, but the amount of work I did to get around packet limitations was probably not worth it all said and done. BLE is good for event based data transfer of flags and small data, but you outgrow that pretty damn quickly.
- sgtnoodle 6y agoAny advice on how to start messing around with BLE? Is there a good adapter to buy for packet sniffing and whatnot? I have a new interest in BLE on account of myself recently becoming bluetooth enabled.
- gumby 6y agoProgramming BLE is basically bit banging. Regular BT has higher level protocols (which have their problems too -- I hate BT -- but are easier to use). There's a user experience benefit of the semantic separation between BT and Wifi; you move around and change SSID all the time with a portable device like a phone, which is for connecting to "other" things. Your BT connections "travel with you" as they are part of a personal area network. There are weird boundary conditions (connecting to your friend's BT speaker, using wifi to cast to a chromecast or AppleTV) for which neither is perfect; frankly I think those wifi cases are more like the BT use case. Just because the two use the same BT spectrum doesn't mean they should be unified.
- rektide 6y agoif only there were some good flows for attaching sound input / outputs & input devices over wifi there are some technical means. one could use usb-ip[1] to bridge peripherals, for example. but few rise to the status of "flows", good well paved paths. [1] http://usbip.sourceforge.net/ http://usbip.sourceforge.net/
- gsich 6y agoIs usbip finally usable?
- qbasic_forever 6y agoIn my experience, no. I would really love for it to be a thing as it's perfect for sharing devices on your computer to containers or VMs (i.e. program and debug your ARM MCU with a complex embedded toolchain and programmer running in a simple docker container). But in my experience USB over IP is still kind of a "here's a bunch of kernel modules and not a lot of documentation; good luck on windows" stage.
- gsich 6y agoSad, that was my experience too a few years back.
- timonoko 6y agoNetcat and sox works spendidly: rec -p | nc -l 7777 nc 192.168.1.11 7777 | play -v 0.1 -
- mlichvar 6y agoThat can work, but probably not very well. Without real-time resampling some buffer in the path will underrun or overrun depending on whether the recording soundcard is sampling slower or faster than the playback soundcard. The clocks are not synchronized.
- 6y ago
- tracerbulletx 6y agoI just got a new router today to try the VR streaming from Desktop PC to my Quest 2 and it works flawlessly. Pretty exciting if it can do that it can probably do anything else. The part I don't know is what the energy use tradeoffs are. I know wifi6 is supposed to be lower energy cost?
- akhilcacharya 6y agoMight be wrong, but I'm under the impression that the video encoding has a significantly higher energy cost on the Quest 2. Virtual Desktop even allows an OC setting if I remember correctly. It helps, of course, that the bandwidth required for VR streaming is fairly low using the Oculus link protocol.
- jnurmine 6y agoI hope not. For one thing, Bluetooth consumes less battery. Also, when the topic of Bluetooth comes up, many people complain that they have Bluetooth issues. Sadly, some manufacturers do not care about interoperability. Maybe I'm just lucky but I don't even recall when I would've had issues with Bluetooth. I use several devices practically every day (car, headphones, speakers).
- dinero_rojo 6y agoAt least read the abstract before commenting, man...
- jnurmine 6y agoI did, man. Table 1. Wi-Le Energy/packet: 84 uJ Wi-Le Idle current: 2.5 uA BLE Energy/packet: 71 uJ BLE Idle current: 1.1 uA You can see this from Figure 4 as well. So, like I wrote, Bluetooth consumes less battery. In addition there are unsolved issues, which are likely to add to the overall consumption. Edit: formatting
- theta_d 6y ago> We believe that an application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) implementation will have much lower power consumption. Line from right above the table so it could possibly go the other direction and use less.
- kumarvvr 6y agoAs the paper explains. At the actual energy consumption level, the modulation techniques used by WiFi are about 3 times more efficient than Bluetooth. The whole premise of the article is that this allows for efficient use of WiFi hardware to emulate BLE like behaviour.
- The_rationalist 6y agoBluetooth even with proprietary codes like aptix is lossily compressing already compressed audio which is a shame. I really hope WIFI (or a future Bluetooth standard version) will alleviate this big issue in the future
- admax88q 6y agoI think there is a wirelrss revolution around the corner being held up by patents, closed chipsets, and closed firmwares. Look at what was necessary in this papet, thr IoT device pretends to be an access point to bypass all the layers in the stack that would filter out thr packet. In this case they found a hack to workaround chipset/firmware limitations, but what other innovations havent happened due to inaccesible wireless physical layers?
- qbasic_forever 6y agoCheck our SDR, you can have access to anything in the physical layer with ease these days. Like here's a fancy SDR system running as a wifi AP: https://www.rtl-sdr.com/bladerf-wiphy-open-source-wifi-access-point-on-a-bladerf/ https://www.rtl-sdr.com/bladerf-wiphy-open-source-wifi-acces... You'll need a proper FCC license to do much transmitting of anything on non-standard frequencies though.
- pitaj 6y agoI can't tell if "thr" is a typo of "the" or an abbreviation of "their".
- admax88q 6y agolol typo of "the." I hate typing on mobile.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- elisaado 6y agoI thought you were mocking wireless packet loss or something.
- ThePowerOfFuet 6y agoThis seems like the perfect type of error which is caught by autocorrect. Do you have it enabled?
- 6y ago
- antoniuschan99 6y agoWi-Le is interesting. Does it mean you don’t have to connect to a wifi hotspot to do configuration? The product I made uses BLE to connect between device and mobile for things such as connecting the device to a wifi router. Otherwise the device connects to wifi normally.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- lp_literate 6y agoSo only one way (upstream) communication via "beacons"? What about downstream - thats where the complexity is.
- lp_literate 6y agoAnd BT uses adaptive frequency hopping which is huge for avoiding interference. Ultimately, your BT experience will vary depending on whether your device vendor has implemented advanced features, and done interoperability tests. Lastly, BT could relatively easily move to the shiny new 6 GHz spectrum and make use of Very Low Power (VLP) assuming there is some spectrum harmonization done all over the world. https://docs.fcc.gov/public/attachments/DOC-363490A1.pdf https://docs.fcc.gov/public/attachments/DOC-363490A1.pdf
- otabdeveloper4 6y agoWhere I live the Wi-Fi spectrum is already busted. There are several dozen visible access points right now, and if I go outside where no metal shielding is happening I'd probably see 100 or more of them. And that's just the well-behaving honest Wi-Fi access points, not all the other crap on these frequencies that periodically destroys signal with interference.
- AndrewDucker 6y agoBluetooth uses exactly the same spectrum as one of the WiFi frequencies (2.4GHz).
- otabdeveloper4 6y agoYeah, that's probably a contributing factor to the problem.
- esperent 6y agoAnd when I have wifi turned on on my laptop, I get a .5 second gap in bluetooth audio approximately once every thirty seconds.
- KorfmannArno 6y agoTurning on Wifi makes bluetooth audio unbearable on my Lenovo Chromebook.
- MayeulC 6y agoRight, though it uses narrower frequency bands, so you have about 10 times as many channels in the same ammount of spectrum. And Bluetooth hops around these channels, dynamically selecting the one with less interference.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- AnonC 6y agoI can’t wait to get rid of Bluetooth for its issues with range and badly implemented devices and software where pairing doesn’t “stick” for long. The only good thing is the energy consumption with BLE. Like USB 3.whatever and USB-C, Bluetooth is generally a pile of garbage standards in a pile of garbage standards with poor implementations. Some Apple devices seem to be doing better with Bluetooth. Elsewhere it’s a bag of hurt. But that’s purely anecdotal from my end.
- executesorder66 6y agoI thought Wifi Direct already did this? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wi-Fi_Direct https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wi-Fi_Direct
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- robertu 6y agoBeyond battery efficiency, another pro that WiFi over Bluetooth is the security.
- totallyabstract 6y agoA recent development not mentioned in this article is Wi-Fi Halow/802.11ah, this is a new standard using the 900MHz ISM band. Advantages of this are better signal penetration/range for the same output power (or lower output power for the same range). Compared to 2.4/5G wifi Halow uses narrower bandwidths so has lower data rates but is still much higher than BLE. BLE can do up to ~2MBit with a 2MHz BW, 802.11ah can do up to ~8MBit with a 2MHz BW but can go up to 16MHz BW. Additionally 802.11ah supports MIMO, so it can also scale the bandwidth up with more antennas. There are some other new fun features in 802.11ah namely TWT (target wake time) which is a powersaving method that solves a lot of the problems the article mentioned with powersaving in wifi.