RIM Crippling BlackBerry Bluetooth Speed?

Alex King writes " I organized a bounty for the creation of a 'BlackBerry as a modem' solution for Mac OS X earlier this year. The resulting product — Pulse, from Brain Murmurs — allows you to use your BlackBerry as a standard Bluetooth modem. It works great on both Windows and Mac. Current problem: The Pulse solution doesn't run as fast as it used to. Brain Murmurs did a bunch of testing and working with their users and found the problem: RIM has crippled the Bluetooth speeds in recent OS upgrades. Is this a 'mistake' on RIM's side that will be fixed? Or did they do this on purpose for some reason?"

Perhaps ask RIM what the problem is?

[Whiney Mac Fanboy]

Maybe the author of the blog should have considered asking RIM what the problem is?

I guess the point of the blog (and the trollish /. headline) is to generate plenty of hits to a page which extolls the virtues of the software & software house in question.

Why on earth would RIM want you to do this?

[Archeopteryx]

You abuse their network with your modem software. They have a network designed for messaging, and you want to send huge files over it. I don't blame them for wanting to cripple a capability that they never wanted to sell you.

You get what you pay for. Usually.

IP over RF always limits bandwidth

[jmorris42]

Haven't seen an IP over RF provider who didn't start ruthlessly choking off bandwidth to anyone who actually consumes more than a few sips of their 'high speed Internet' products. It is OK if you do a few short bursts now and again, that is the usage model they built their network around. A Blouetooth connection to a laptop implies more than that so once the network operator noticed they had users USING their network they acted quickly to fix the problem.

The crux of the problem is that no RF system that has been deployed has enough bandwidth to supply 'broadbad' like connectivity to very many people at the same time. So the early adopters get it good, tell their friends and watch it all turn to crap. Unless we see microcells on every lamppost we aren't likely to ever solve the problem either. And no amount of marketing promises can change it, you can't repeal the laws of physics.

Cable modems had exactly the same problem of a shared resource quickly becoming overused. The cable industry could solve it by breaking up their originally simplistic network into lots of small segments because they could string FIBER to backhaul all of the neighborhood networks. Unless the wireless companies want to do likewise they are never going to be a player in the broadband game as anything other than a niche product priced high (billed by the bit) enough to limit usage to the available spectrum.

Re:Why on earth would RIM want you to do this?

[waldo2020]

RIM didn't design the cell phone network, dorkwad. RIM the other devices work over the approved and paid for data channels. If you are paying $80/mo for "unlimited data" you better damn well get what the system can handle. And FYI, CDMA and GSM systems use a time division multiplex method so it's not like a cable modem link shared with the neighbourhood; you can't choke the whole system by being a data-hog, at most you can consume your alloted time-slice.

Having worked on a BT product I agree

[EmbeddedJanitor]

Before looking for a communist under every bush, consider that there are quite a few things to get right to get BT working. A BT driver depends on other drivers (eg often serial drivers) and slight changes in the realtime behaviour of drivers can cause link errors which cause corruptions and retires etc and ultimately reduce BT throughput. Extra interrupts etc in the system can easily cause BT errors.

Re:One thing that RIM is crippling

[DrKyle]

You can teach a TEN year old not to play with your phone, but a TWO year old isn't going to listen to your explanation about not playing with it to dial 911 by accident.

A phone is not a razor blade, grenade or flame thrower. I let my kids play with my phone (when locked), the remote, the mouse and keyboard on the computer (with Toddlerkeys [ms11.net] enabled). They see their parents hitting buttons and doing things and they want to emulate us to some extent and see what the big deal is about and their curiosity should be encouraged. The problem here is entirely with RIM, any keypress which can accidentally happen just by shoving the phone in your pocket and dial 911 is not a feature, it's a bug.

Re:IP over RF always limits bandwidth

[The Master Control P]

Who says it takes a malicious provider to make IP over RF suck?

I'm sitting here with my computer 20 feet from my 802.11g hub, getting an alleged 80% signal and 54mbps connection. Yet lo and behold, when I actually transfer data to my server (hooked to the hub over 100m ethernet), I get more like 10 megabits per second instead of 50. Unless there's some malicious program on the hub (!), wireless sucks compared to wired for speed.