How ‘Bluetooth PANs’ Are Serving as Saviour To ‘PC Market’
Conventional computers (PCs) have been reigning ‘Personalised Computing’ market since Home PCs came into existance. It’s only with the advent of laptops and Netbooks that Personal Computers have started losing their business in a fast paced manner.
The major reason why laptops are now being preferred over Personal Computers is because of its Portability and Integrity. Portability is a characteristic which cannot be achieved with Personal computers, as the bulky hardware that constitutes a PC can’t be carried along so easily.
By integrity, we mean that every single constituent of a PC, such as Monitor, Keyboard, Mouse, Webcam, processor(CPU), CD/DVD ROM, speakers etc are all built into one single unit called laptop. This way, one does not need to take the hassles of buying, cabling and carrying along individual components of their computing device.
The only proven saviour to PC market these days has been an amalgamation of ‘Bluetooth’ technology and ‘Personal Area Network’. Just to make home computing experience much better and enhanced, most of the computer peripherals are now coming up with Bluetooth support.
As Bluetooth is a wireless communication standard for short range data transmission, it can be effectively used as a medium for the exchange of data between various computer peripherals, eliminating the need of cables for data exchange.
Most of the computer peripherals such as Keyboard, Mouse, printer, headphone, webcam, internet modem among others are all coming up with built-in Bluetooth support these days. And with all these peripherals going wireless, the ease of using PC has improved a lot than before.
On a technical note, use of Bluetooth technology as an alternative to conventional cables actually creates a Personal Area Network with a limited range of ten metres or so.
Similar to Wide Area Network(WAN) or Local Area Network(LAN), there is Personal Area Network(PAN), which came into existance with the evolution of Limited distance communication technologies such as Bluetooth, IrDA, UWB, Zigbee and few others.
Now, in a scenario where all the computer peripherals are inter-connected via Bluetooth wireless technology, the interconnected devices form a Personal Area Network(PAN), more commonly known as a Piconet. Technically, a Piconet is basically an ad-hoc network, comprising of multiple devices, in a master-slave configuration (1 master and upto 7 active slaves).
As a whole, the concept of Bluetooth PANs in home computing space has certainly given a ‘technology boost’ to lagging PC market.
