MSI PC2PC Bluetooth (3)
Overclocker 3 May 2002

After installing the software, you can configure your Bluetooth device on your local PC. In order for communication to take place, a bluetooth serial port connection must be first established. The diagram below shows the available services that are available for the client to conect to. In this case, we enabled Network Access and File Transfer. Below is a screen shot of the configuration at the Shuttle SS50 machine (which is our server).

At the client, you would have to query this machine for what sort of service is available. it will list down File transfer and Network access. In our test, we use our client machine which is the MSI 845E max to connect to the server (the Shuttle SS50) or rather the provider of network service. 

Within seconds we were connected. A new subnet 192.168.0.0 is formed. The client and server are in the same subnet bearing IP address 192.168.0 105 and 192.168.0.1. This is a piconet. As each client/server or master/slave pairs can be master or slaves of another machine of another pair, the piconets can be enlarged and will formed a larger scatternet. An Average ping time of 48ms is achieved which is something like our timing from my ADSL 256/512k network ping time to a MSI TW website.

While we try to access the net from the client machine, it makes no connection. We began to troubleshoot and found that it is necessary to enable Network Sharing on the server machine in Network connections. This is to enable the routing of data packets to the 192.168.0.0 network.

To our surprise, the surfing speed is very smooth and we even managed to stream in 56Kbit Spiderman trailer from a US website without any problems. We went on to test a video stream from my local ISP which is a 300Kbits video stream, no video image was available at all.

We did a further test on the Network connection by having a real load which is a VCD .DAT file being transferred and played at the same time on the Shuttle SS50 PC. The VCD is loaded onto the MSI 845E max, CDROM is a 40X CDROM. We map the IP to the Shared G: on the MSI machine and began our tests. Although we are able to hear the Audio and Video coming through our Shuttle SS50 PC, there is lots of jittering, making watching a VCD across such a connection impossible. In fact, that is predictable. Why we wanted to do that is to see the sustained data transfer across a network.

Using Performance monitor on the W2K, we look a the Bluetooth Network interface Object and check out the various counters it exposed. As you can see from the chart below, there is basically no discarded or error or drop out bytes. The pink colour line indicates the bytes total/sec. The Blue line indicates the bandwidth. From the chart, we can see that the theoretical bandwidth is not met, the sustained bandwidth is around 0.7 x bandwidth. (this test is done on the server machine reading the VCD .dat file across the bluetooth connection).

A look at the logs at the server PC shows that the Bluetooth LAN access server driver information breakdown. Do take note the figures are in Bytes. For easy computation, we take 1 byte=10 bits, thus bytes received/sec.

Bytes Received/sec 72222.697 Bytes  ~ 720,000 bit/s or 720Kb/s or 0.72 Mbps.
One thing I note about this information is that the value reflected for Current Bandwidth. It shows 10,000,000. There is no unit specified. If that is in Byte/s, that means it is 100Mbps which is not correct.

From our experiment, we can see that the speed of Bluetooth connection is around 0.7 Mbps. Bluetooth has a max of 1Mbps data rate.

Conclusion

We see that Bluetooth might be the next thing that will replace desktop or IrDA. I would predict that most manufacturers might adopt bluetooth technology onto mainboards or notebooks. Some might go the way of wireless LAN. Well, till the day when both 802.11b and Bluetooth doesn't interfere on the 2.4G band, I think the chances of having both on the same platform still remains yet to be resolved.

It's commendable that MSI took the first steps in making this innovative challenge. The package as a whole is cool. I would say that the documentation needs to be improved especially those who are not network trained. They will be lost in the phase of configuring the network access.

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