7 ms·

> It's sad that my family uses the available Bluetooth devices less than if there was a wire we could just plug into. I specifically buy wired gaming headphone

> It's sad that my family uses the available Bluetooth devices less than if there was a wire we could just plug into. I specifically buy wired gaming headphones, wired mice and wired keyboards - if there is any sensible wired option I'll take it every time, I even have an extra long network cable I can throw across the living room for the laptop. Wireless stuff is just less reliable and always seems to throw issues when you really need it to work.

david927 4y ago
We specifically got a printer that only can connect via a USB cable and it's been perfect. But that's not the answer. Why? It's not that much data. WiFi doesn't seem to have some of these problems. Why is Bluetooth so shit?
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- rand49an 4y ago
  Because WiFi is only trying to fix one problem: connect your device to a local network. Bluetooth has hundreds of different use-cases.
  - ghaff 4y ago
    >Bluetooth has hundreds of different use-cases. That is probably true but part of the problem is that, as I recall from years of Intel Developer Forums, Bluetooth was originally focused on mobile headsets and there were a bunch of other wireless technologies floating around for other purposes. However, for whatever historical reasons, Bluetooth through a number of iterations pretty much ended up gobbling up all the non-WiFi wireless use cases (other than cellular and NFC of course). And it arguably wasn't really suited for a lot of them.
zachallaun 4y ago
One of my favorite wireless devices is a Logitech gaming mouse (G903) that I use with a mousepad that is also a charging mat. It uses a low-latency proprietary wireless protocol: https://www.logitechg.com/en-us/innovation/lightspeed.html https://www.logitechg.com/en-us/innovation/lightspeed.html
- bee_rider 4y ago
  Logitech's silly little plug-in receivers seem to be weirdly better than bluetooth, and they have been for as long as I remember. I don't really get why. If they have some magic technology in there, how has the Bluetooth SIG not managed to copy it?
  - falcolas 4y ago
    The magic technology is that it's not following the bluetooth spec. It's a custom spec that works remarkably well, because it's reasonably scoped and not written by a multi-corporation-for-profit SIG. Their dongles for wireless audio work like magic too - as close to zero latency as I've found in wireless computer headphones.
  - yjftsjthsd-h 4y ago
    My understanding is that one of BT's big problems is that it's underspecified, so every implementation is slightly incompatible. Only having to deal with one implementation is therefore probably enough magic, but the BT SIG can't just copy it without changing the spec.
  - ROTMetro 4y ago
    You are telling me that a single purpose spec/software/hardware stack works better than a complicated multi use case/OS/hardware standard? Call me shocked. My cordless phone in the 90s dropped less calls than my cell phone today, how have cell phone companies not managed to copy it?
BrandoElFollito 4y ago
This reminds me when our president (France) announced the quarantine and schools shutdown. While my children were yelling their joy (we could hear all children in the neighborhood), I sat at Amazon to order three 20 m ethernet cables. They were part of our home decoration for a year and a half, laying across the house to reliably connect to the switch and fiber.
rockostrich 4y ago
> I even have an extra long network cable I can throw across the living room for the laptop This seems unnecessary unless you have high latency requirements, like for FPS or fighter gaming, but even then WiFi (and network coding for these games) has gotten so good that lag is barely noticeable anyway. I say this as someone who has my desk hardwired with an unmanaged switch because it seems silly to not take the time to hardwire a stationary PC and the place where I spend the majority of my time working: if I go downstairs with my work laptop then I'm going going to drape an ethernet cable across my living room just so my connection is 1 Gbps still instead of 400+ Mbps.
- Karunamon 4y ago
  To be a bit pedantic, lag and throughput aren't the main bugbears for wireless anymore, it's stability. If you live or work in a reasonably populated area, there is often enough Wi-Fi pollution around to make things like gaming or video calls painful. Sure, you'll get around 20 ms to the AP most of the time, the problem is it will occasionally spike to 200 or 2000 for a moment and there's very little you can do about it.
  - falcolas 4y ago
    100% - it's these occasional spikes which honk everything up. Google meets immediately assumes your internet is crap and degrades the client, you become a robot to your listeners, and recovery takes noticeably longer than the few hundred MS it occurred in.
  - jaywalk 4y ago
    20ms to your router? That's horrendous.
  - vel0city 4y ago
    > Sure, you'll get around 20 ms to the AP most of the time If you're getting 20ms to your AP you're in a pretty poor environment or you need to upgrade away from 802.11b. While on a video call on my laptop just now, while my home theater receiver is streaming internet radio over WiFi, while I've got a dozen other devices active on my WiFi, my average latency to my router is ~1ms. Running a speed test on my phone pushing pulling >500Mbit, my latency spiked...to 12ms! Just like with the rest of this discussion about Bluetooth being bad, if you've got poor equipment and a poor environment you're gonna have a bad time. I have some cheap USB WiFi adapters which are terrible and struggle to get good performance. I don't use those except for temporary things or when I just don't care about network performance. I don't have issues with the Intel WiFi chips on my desktop or laptops or my Ubiquiti APs.
simonh 4y ago
I make an exception for ear buds, because the utility of being able to stand up, and walk around with my hands free and unencumbered by a tether while on a call, is just so great. It helps that Air Pods are among the best implementation there is, but even they are not perfect. I had to disable automatic device switching or they would occasionally get confused and drop the connection to the current device.
- tehjoker 4y ago
  i just thread the wire under my shirt, it's pretty similar and you can take the earbuds off and they just hang there
  - vel0city 4y ago
    That's kind of OK if you're connecting to a mobile device in your pocket, but there are lots of things I use headphones with. I might be connected to my phone, I might be connected to my laptop, I might be connected to my desktop. Maybe my phone is in my pocket, maybe its on the desk, maybe its on my coffee table across the room. My wireless headphones work all throughout the house without having to have a device physically on me. I can be listening to a call on my computer, get up and walk to the kitchen, make a snack, and walk back to my office and never miss a beat.
  - prmoustache 4y ago
    When I am on a videocall with my coworkers and want to fill my glass with water, I like being able to go to the kitchen without having to undock and drag my laptop all over the house. Same if I need to find something in a shelf. That is pretty much the only reason I use bt headset.
    - asdff 4y ago
      I'm surprised your bluetooth headphones don't just cut out when you do that. My experience is blutooth has a range of like 30 feet and that quickly diminishes when you introduce walls into the equation.
bornfreddy 4y ago
I agree 99% - the exception being the mouse. Since it is meant to be moved around, any obstacle (such as cable) really changes how it handles. I didn't believe it until I went to wireless and then (for a short time) back. Otherwise agree for keyboard, network, headphones,... Wires work.
- The_Colonel 4y ago
  Well, head moves quite a lot as well. Out of all wireless things, the headphones have been the biggest revolution for me.
  - asdff 4y ago
    That's been the biggest step back for me. I have plenty of wire length on my headphones, never felt like I couldn't turn my head or was in any way hindered. Having to keep them charged up and buy replacement batteries every few years seems a lot more annoying.

david927 4y ago

We specifically got a printer that only can connect via a USB cable and it's been perfect. But that's not the answer. Why? It's not that much data. WiFi doesn't seem to have some of these problems. Why is Bluetooth so shit?

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
rand49an 4y ago
Because WiFi is only trying to fix one problem: connect your device to a local network. Bluetooth has hundreds of different use-cases.
- ghaff 4y ago
  >Bluetooth has hundreds of different use-cases. That is probably true but part of the problem is that, as I recall from years of Intel Developer Forums, Bluetooth was originally focused on mobile headsets and there were a bunch of other wireless technologies floating around for other purposes. However, for whatever historical reasons, Bluetooth through a number of iterations pretty much ended up gobbling up all the non-WiFi wireless use cases (other than cellular and NFC of course). And it arguably wasn't really suited for a lot of them.

zachallaun 4y ago

One of my favorite wireless devices is a Logitech gaming mouse (G903) that I use with a mousepad that is also a charging mat. It uses a low-latency proprietary wireless protocol: https://www.logitechg.com/en-us/innovation/lightspeed.html https://www.logitechg.com/en-us/innovation/lightspeed.html

bee_rider 4y ago
Logitech's silly little plug-in receivers seem to be weirdly better than bluetooth, and they have been for as long as I remember. I don't really get why. If they have some magic technology in there, how has the Bluetooth SIG not managed to copy it?
- falcolas 4y ago
  The magic technology is that it's not following the bluetooth spec. It's a custom spec that works remarkably well, because it's reasonably scoped and not written by a multi-corporation-for-profit SIG. Their dongles for wireless audio work like magic too - as close to zero latency as I've found in wireless computer headphones.
- yjftsjthsd-h 4y ago
  My understanding is that one of BT's big problems is that it's underspecified, so every implementation is slightly incompatible. Only having to deal with one implementation is therefore probably enough magic, but the BT SIG can't just copy it without changing the spec.
- ROTMetro 4y ago
  You are telling me that a single purpose spec/software/hardware stack works better than a complicated multi use case/OS/hardware standard? Call me shocked. My cordless phone in the 90s dropped less calls than my cell phone today, how have cell phone companies not managed to copy it?

BrandoElFollito 4y ago

This reminds me when our president (France) announced the quarantine and schools shutdown. While my children were yelling their joy (we could hear all children in the neighborhood), I sat at Amazon to order three 20 m ethernet cables. They were part of our home decoration for a year and a half, laying across the house to reliably connect to the switch and fiber.

rockostrich 4y ago

> I even have an extra long network cable I can throw across the living room for the laptop This seems unnecessary unless you have high latency requirements, like for FPS or fighter gaming, but even then WiFi (and network coding for these games) has gotten so good that lag is barely noticeable anyway. I say this as someone who has my desk hardwired with an unmanaged switch because it seems silly to not take the time to hardwire a stationary PC and the place where I spend the majority of my time working: if I go downstairs with my work laptop then I'm going going to drape an ethernet cable across my living room just so my connection is 1 Gbps still instead of 400+ Mbps.

Karunamon 4y ago
To be a bit pedantic, lag and throughput aren't the main bugbears for wireless anymore, it's stability. If you live or work in a reasonably populated area, there is often enough Wi-Fi pollution around to make things like gaming or video calls painful. Sure, you'll get around 20 ms to the AP most of the time, the problem is it will occasionally spike to 200 or 2000 for a moment and there's very little you can do about it.
- falcolas 4y ago
  100% - it's these occasional spikes which honk everything up. Google meets immediately assumes your internet is crap and degrades the client, you become a robot to your listeners, and recovery takes noticeably longer than the few hundred MS it occurred in.
- jaywalk 4y ago
  20ms to your router? That's horrendous.
- vel0city 4y ago
  > Sure, you'll get around 20 ms to the AP most of the time If you're getting 20ms to your AP you're in a pretty poor environment or you need to upgrade away from 802.11b. While on a video call on my laptop just now, while my home theater receiver is streaming internet radio over WiFi, while I've got a dozen other devices active on my WiFi, my average latency to my router is ~1ms. Running a speed test on my phone pushing pulling >500Mbit, my latency spiked...to 12ms! Just like with the rest of this discussion about Bluetooth being bad, if you've got poor equipment and a poor environment you're gonna have a bad time. I have some cheap USB WiFi adapters which are terrible and struggle to get good performance. I don't use those except for temporary things or when I just don't care about network performance. I don't have issues with the Intel WiFi chips on my desktop or laptops or my Ubiquiti APs.

simonh 4y ago

I make an exception for ear buds, because the utility of being able to stand up, and walk around with my hands free and unencumbered by a tether while on a call, is just so great. It helps that Air Pods are among the best implementation there is, but even they are not perfect. I had to disable automatic device switching or they would occasionally get confused and drop the connection to the current device.

tehjoker 4y ago
i just thread the wire under my shirt, it's pretty similar and you can take the earbuds off and they just hang there
- vel0city 4y ago
  That's kind of OK if you're connecting to a mobile device in your pocket, but there are lots of things I use headphones with. I might be connected to my phone, I might be connected to my laptop, I might be connected to my desktop. Maybe my phone is in my pocket, maybe its on the desk, maybe its on my coffee table across the room. My wireless headphones work all throughout the house without having to have a device physically on me. I can be listening to a call on my computer, get up and walk to the kitchen, make a snack, and walk back to my office and never miss a beat.
- prmoustache 4y ago
  When I am on a videocall with my coworkers and want to fill my glass with water, I like being able to go to the kitchen without having to undock and drag my laptop all over the house. Same if I need to find something in a shelf. That is pretty much the only reason I use bt headset.
  - asdff 4y ago
    I'm surprised your bluetooth headphones don't just cut out when you do that. My experience is blutooth has a range of like 30 feet and that quickly diminishes when you introduce walls into the equation.

bornfreddy 4y ago

I agree 99% - the exception being the mouse. Since it is meant to be moved around, any obstacle (such as cable) really changes how it handles. I didn't believe it until I went to wireless and then (for a short time) back. Otherwise agree for keyboard, network, headphones,... Wires work.

The_Colonel 4y ago
Well, head moves quite a lot as well. Out of all wireless things, the headphones have been the biggest revolution for me.
- asdff 4y ago
  That's been the biggest step back for me. I have plenty of wire length on my headphones, never felt like I couldn't turn my head or was in any way hindered. Having to keep them charged up and buy replacement batteries every few years seems a lot more annoying.