Using a Bluetooth Network

In This Chapter

Delving into Bluetooth

Enabling cell phone networking with Bluetooth

Getting Bluetooth on your PDA or PC

Discovering other Bluetooth devices
Most of the time, when people talk about wireless networks, they’re talking
about wireless local area networks (LANs). LANs, as the name
implies, are local, meaning that they don’t cover a wide area (like a town or a
city block). Wide area networks (WANs), like the Internet, do that bigger job.
For the most part, you can think of a LAN as something that’s designed to
cover your entire house (and maybe surrounding areas like the back patio).
Another kind of wireless network is being developed and promoted by wireless
equipment manufacturers called the personal area network (PAN), which is
designed to cover just a few yards of space and not a whole house (or office,
or factory floor, or whatever). PANs are typically designed to connect personal
devices (cell phones, laptop computers, and handheld computers/personal
digital assistants [PDAs]) and also as a technology for connecting peripheral
devices to these personal electronics. For example, you could use a wireless
PAN technology to connect a mouse and a keyboard to your computer without
any cables under the desk for your beagle to trip over.
The difference between LANs and PANs isn’t all that clear cut. Some devices
might be able to establish network connections by using either LAN or PAN
technologies. The bottom-line distinction between LANs and PANs is this: If
something connects to a computer by a network cable today, its wireless connection
will usually be a LAN; if it connects by a local cable (like Universal
Serial Bus [USB]), its wireless connection will usually be a PAN.
In this chapter, we discuss the most prominent wireless PAN technology:
Bluetooth, which we introduce in Chapter 3. Bluetooth is a technology that’s
been in development for years and years. We first wrote about it in our first
edition of Smart Homes For Dummies (Wiley Publishing, Inc.) in 1999. For a
while, it seemed that Bluetooth might end up in the historical dustbin of wireless
networking — a great idea that never panned out — but as we write, it
appears that the technology has caught up with its promise. We expect to see
a ton of new Bluetooth devices hitting the market over the next few years.
Bluetooth is still a relatively new technology. Although a lot of Bluetooth
products (mainly cell phones and cell phone accessories) are now available,
other Bluetooth products (such as keyboards) aren’t widely available in the
United States (where we’re based). Bluetooth seems to be taking off first in
Europe (and to a slightly lesser degree, in Asia) and moving over to the
United States a bit more slowly. This isn’t really surprising because a lot of
mobile technologies (particularly cell phone-related technologies) have been
developing faster in those places than they have in the U.S. We mention this
because some of the Bluetooth categories that we discuss in this chapter are
really in the coming-soon category when it comes to U.S. availability. We’re
confident that many of these devices will be available in the U.S. by the time
that you read this (or soon thereafter), but as we write in early 2003, they’re
not quite here yet. A great resource for finding cool Bluetooth gear before it
becomes generally available in the U.S. is the BlueUnplugged online store
based in England (www.blueunplugged.com).