Bluetooth vesus Infra Red for Mobiles

[Slowdown]

Hi Everybody,

I have been regularly using my laptop to surf the internet via my mobile phone. I uses the infra red connection between the laptop and mobile phone to dial up to my ISP.

The speed is however horrible. I get about 14kps speed. My ISP connection can read up to 54kps using a normal telephone line.

I am thinking of buying a mobile phone with bluetooth connectivity (e.g. Sony T610).

I am wondering whether my internet connection will improve if I uses bluetooth connection instead of IR. For that, I need to buy a bluetooth adapter for my laptop.

The price of a new mobile phone and an additional bluetooth adapter will simply be too much if I don't get better connection speed.

Practical experience sharing will be appreciated.

Thanks.

[Cirga]

I cant give you a first hand account here.. because I have not used the wireless IR to dial up on my laptop. But if the bluetooth adapter plugs directly into your laptop (no IR) then I would say yes it will be much better.

IR is great.. and very convenient but it cant compare to something plugged directly into your PC. That being said.. I would go for it were I using my laptop like that all the time.

Just my opinion on this of course.

[LO There!]

From what i'v been reading of late on bluetooth/pc on the net.
seems best to go with a usb bluetooth adapter, and not to use any form of cards! pc or laptop.

[Slowdown]

Hi Everybody,

I had a conversation with some of my friends and we concluded that my dialup internet speed will not make a difference whether I am using a bluetooth or an IR connection between the laptop and mobile phone.

Our theory is that the bottleneck is between the mobile phone and the ISP connection, not between the laptop and mobile phone.

Theory theory theory. Unfortunate no money to prove the theory.

[leopold]

Ah... now I CAN prove this for you!

I've tried the same thing using GSM (a uselessly slow 9600bps connection) and GPRS (a reasonable 28kbps but bloody expensive) over both IR and Bluetooth, on a Sony Ericsson T68i.

There was no difference in speed. At all.

The only gain you'll get is that the Bluetooth connection won't be interrupted if you move the phone. On the downside, the Bluetooth connection is a pain in the butt to set up.

The bottleneck is the connection your mobile phone uses to connect to the phone providers network. So if you're using GSM (which it appears you are) then you're one of the lucky ones who use a phone provider that uses 14kbps for data. Yes, lucky!

To get more speed, either move to HSCSD or GPRS - both 28kbps, and I believe both are always on connections charged by data transfer rather than time. GPRS is this, definitely.

Or you could try using a 3G network, which is much faster. I'd heard rumours, though, that using those can make you vomit. Not sure why, must be a wave thing...

Or perhaps hold out for a 4G network, which promises broadband speeds.

[Cirga]

Leopold that rocks. And that does make sense .. of where the real bottleneck is. That sort of reminds me of the movie Antitrust. Where they are trying to create a handler that can get past the bottleneck of handheld wireless devices.

[Fister]

Iglan is our "blue tooth expert" He recently set up a network of his own.