Cheap Bluetooth might have connection hitches
Fair enough, but I’ve only ever seen this happen with cheap wireless cards / chipsets that do both Bluetooth and WiFi and don’t properly avoid interference between these two (for example, I can get perfectly functioning Bluetooth audio out of my laptop with shitty Realtek wireless card if I completely disable WiFi (not just disconnect)). I think this is less of an issue for dedicated Bluetooth devices.
Bluetooth doesn’t work with airplane mode although I think most airplanes these days aren’t actually affected or we’d have planes dropping out if the sky daily.
Yeah, that’s true. As for the second part, AFAIK there was never an issue with 2.4 GHz radios (which is the frequency band Bluetooth uses) interfering with planes, it was more of a liability / laws thing - the plane manufacturer never explicitly said that these radios are safe (so the airline just banned them to be safe) and/or laws didn’t allow non-certified radios to operate on planes.
Also, does Bluetooth get saturated the way WiFi does?
Eventually yes, but it’s much more resilient than WiFi - 2.4 GHz WiFi only has three non-overlapping channels to work with (and there’s a whole thing with the in-between channels being even worse for everyone involved than everyone just using the same correct three channels that I won’t get into), while Bluetooth slices the same spectrum into 79 fully usable channels. It also uses much lower transmission power, so signal travels a shorter distance. And unlike WiFi, it can dynamically migrate from channel to channel (in fact, it does this even without any interference). 100 people actually seeing each other’s devices might be a problem, but I don’t think that’s a realistic scenario - Bluetooth will use the lowest transmit power at which it can get a reliable link, so if everyone’s devices are only transmitting over a meter or so, there shouldn’t be any noticeable interference on the other side of the plane.
BarryZuckerkorn@beehaw.org 4 weeks ago
The radio regulations were amended about 10 years ago to allow both Bluetooth and Wifi frequencies to be used on airplanes in flight. And so cell phone manufacturers have shifted what airplane mode actually means, even to the point of some phones not even turning off Wi-Fi when airplane mode is turned on. And regardless of defaults, both wireless protocols can be activated and deactivated independently of airplane mode on most phones now.
I don’t think so. Bluetooth is such a low bandwidth use that it can handle many simultaneous users. It’s supposed to be a low power transmission method, in which it bursts a signal only a tiny percentage of the time, so the odds of a collision for any given signal are low, plus the protocol is designed to be robust where it handles a decent amount of interference before encountering degraded performance.
MagicShel@programming.dev 4 weeks ago
I didn’t know that part (the rest yes). So much for using airplane mode to conserve battery. I suppose it’s the tower handshake that is most energy hungry in my experience.
100% although my comment was in the context of people who don’t really understand Bluetooth at all.
+1 for the rest, thanks.
Melody@lemmy.one 4 weeks ago
Your understanding is slightly off.
Airplane mode Does In Fact Turn off your CELLULAR Radio This radio is what powers your (2/3/4/5)G and LTE (This is 4G btw) connection to the cell towers.
Most international radio communications laws can prohibit the use of Cellular Radio in flight; however they often don’t prohibit the use of shorter range radio technologies such as WIFI or Bluetooth.
It’s all about ‘loudness’. Think about it. Your phone must ‘scream louder’ at a farther away cell tower than it would need to communicate with a nearby WiFi router or a Bluetooth headset.
BarryZuckerkorn@beehaw.org 4 weeks ago
Also, phones don’t use a lot of power to purely listen for Wifi beacons. They’re not transmitting until they actually try to join, so leaving wifi on doesn’t cost significant power unless you just happen to be near a remembered network.