28% taking smartphones and laptops to bed for work: survey

More than a quarter of 329 London workers surveyed admit they routinely take their laptop or other mobile computing device to bed to do work.

The same survey indicated that 57% of bedmates found it "a very annoying habit."

More than half of those who do work in bed did so for between two to six hours every week, according to the recent survey.

Eight percent of the respondents also confessed to spending more time on their mobile devices during the evening than talking to their partners.

When asked the question, "What is the last thing you do before going to sleep?" 96% did say it was to kiss their partners goodnight. The remaining 4% (71% of whom were male, according to the survey) confessed to completing work and checking e-mail.

According to the survey, more than half of the workers are routinely uploading and downloading sensitive corporate information to their mobile device while in bed, and most are using a wireless network, with a fifth admitting their network was not secure as they tapped away answering e-mail and other tasks.

In a list of five tips that included good admonitions to use encryption, strong passwords and the like, the last tip was: "Use your bedroom for what it's designed for and if you're not feeling sleepy, your laptop is the last thing you should be turning to!"

Bluetooth is now as fast as Wi-Fi

Let's talk about how Bluetooth got as fast as Wi-Fi.


Bluetooth 3.0
High Speed Bluetooth has stopped being chained to the low-power, low-throughput radio that has been both its strength and its weakness. Newly developed code lets Bluetooth applications now run over 802.11g wireless connections in the 2.4GHz, with a throughput jump to 20M to 24Mbps, from 1M to 3Mbps.

One of the key creators of this bit of wizardy is Kevin Hayes, a technical fellow with Atheros Communications, who has worked in more than a dozen task groups around the IEEE 802.11 wireless LAN standard, and in Wi-Fi Alliance projects such as Wi-Fi Protected Access.

Hayes was the technical editor for the 802.11 Protocol Adaption Layer (PAL), one of the big changes in the just-announced Bluetooth 3.0 specification, a two-year project. PAL, together with the 802.11 media access control (MAC) and 802.11 physical (PHY) layers constitute the Alternate MAC/PHY or AMP, enabling a Bluetooth profile (such as file transfer) to run over a Wi-Fi link.


It may be the beginning of "Bluetooth everywhere," according to Network World blogger Craig Mathias but make sure you look for the full formal designation: Bluetooth 3.0 + High Speed (or HS). (For some uses, vendors can deploy 3.0 without the ability to use a Wi-Fi connection but they can't use "high speed" in labeling it).


Is this such a big change?
It's a generational change. The Bluetooth SIG wanted something a) that would deliver five to ten times the performance of current Bluetooth b) that would be available to customers in a short timeframe and that was proven technology.

Gartner analysts picked Bluetooth 3.0 as one of eight hot mobile technologies to watch.
With 3.0, the Bluetooth stack exploits whichever radio link is best. Firstly, it would only be used if both sides support it, in silicon and software. Some of the classic Bluetooth profiles, such as the headset profile or the hands-free profile for a car kit, will never use high-speed [Wi-Fi] silicon.

There are many object and file transfer protocols and profiles that would happily use it. Things like file transfer, object push, printing, imaging: all these would involve taking some object or file from one device and moving it to another. The new standard is appropriate for almost all of these.

What happens when the new Bluetooth code is deployed on gadgets with a Wi-Fi radio?
There's a generic Bluetooth framework, that rides over the classic Bluetooth radio. There are a set of protocols for doing things like discover and negotiation and so on. Some configuration variables are currently handed over to the new software module, called the 802.11 PAL, which translates those variables from the Bluetooth domain to the .11 domain. It translates the sent data packets from the Bluetooth stack, and broadcasts these over 802.11.

How does it do that?
It removes part of the Bluetooth stack header and replaces it with the 802.11 header, and sends this to the 802.11 MAC for transmission. And it reverses this process when you're receiving a Bluetooth 802.11 packet.

How complicated was this?
What was the most challenging or puzzling thing about creating this translation layer? Bluetooth, as a stack, does have a different set of expectations in its parlance, compared to IP. For example, the idea of "best effort" in transmission. In IP, best effort means "this channel gets no advanced quality of service." Bluetooth is not quite like that. In Bluetooth, best effort means it doesn't get any advanced priority service, but it is a reliable channel anyway.

Another example, is the way Bluetooth defines certain channels, for example, for audio streaming: Bluetooth will send packets and retry if they get dropped, but after a certain amount of time has passed, it will stop retrying. While 802.11 also does retries, it doesn't use time measurements, but a configurable number of retry attempts.

The PAL layer adapts the intentions of the Bluetooth layer to the capabilities of the features in the 802.11 MAC and PHY physical layers.

How does this mess up existing Bluetooth applications or usage?
This process is very clean: the Bluetooth stack itself is unchanged. That was very important. The "profiles" in the Bluetooth stack are really the applications. That was a very clear mandate from the Bluetooth SIG that none of these would change in order to support this alternate MAC/PHY. They didn't want to have to test all their profiles all over again.

How does adding this new translation step affect performance?
There's no performance loss, because there's no need for any queuing in the adaptation layer and this is normally where you lose performance in a network stack. The 802.11 stack can accept packets at 20Mbps to 25 Mbps: that's more than 10 times as fast as the classic vanilla flavoured Bluetooth.

What about the reverse? How does the Bluetooth stack receive packets at 20Mbps to 25 Mpbs from the 802.11 stack?
That part of the Bluetooth stack is not standardised. So if a mobile phone manufacturer did nothing in their 3.0 implementation to address this, you might have performance issues. You must make changes to this layer to perform at high speeds with 3.0, by adding resources for queuing.

How big a problem is that technically?
It's well within the developers capabilities to address these issues.


What parts of the stack do I have to look at to optimize performance?
This is simply the same exercise you would go through for Bluetooth as you would for adapting your network stack for gigabit Ethernet. You are on familiar ground here.

What will users see?
Clearly, to benefit from the high speed connection, you'll need two devices with the new 3.0 silicon, e.g. a smartphone trying to send five to ten jobs to a PC. Users will be be shown a simple menu option on their smartphone, saying "send to Bluetooth" or a simple Bluetooth menu. They would go through the same motions as they do now, in transferring data but it would just happen faster.


When will they see it?
Nine to 12 months is the time frame, according to the Bluetooth SIG. If you are wanting a smartphone with Bluetooth and 802.11, you'll have to wait for the next version of the phone to come out. I am sure the manufacturers and providers will rush to get these on the shelves as quickly as they can when the technology is available.

Do not skimp on replacing old laptops

Your Business may not survive it!
Not replacing laptops can prove very costly. You will need additional service cover against losses and breakdowns, because the warranties have expired, not to mention the lost productivity in using a three year old model. Keep your laptops up to date and in the new budget. If there are cuts to be made then this not the time or the place.

Companies are trying to cope with reduced IT budgets and are postponing the purchase of new laptop computers but they are making a big mistake.

Extending the use of laptops two years beyond the traditional three-year lifetime cost companies an average of $/Euros 1,050 per machine, more than the initial replacement cost.

The additional costs will include a hype in repair costs simply due to old age, normal wear and tear and the end of three-year warranty periods.

For each laptop user that is using the outdated equipment, it costs the company about $/Euros 9,600 in lost worker productivity over the two-year period.

Many companies are keeping a tight control over new purchases because of the recession. Some forward-thinking companies have taken the more positive step of replacing some user laptops with less expensive smartphones or other handheld devices. Such devices can be far more cost-effective for users who are only using laptops to access e-mail.

The replacement of corporate laptops with mobile devices should grow significantly over the next decade. In fact, it is predicted that in less than 10 years, the majority of Internet users will be accessing the Internet via a mobile device instead of a laptop or desktop.

Mobile devices are now being seen as mission critical but organisations are not quite at the point where they are completely confident about replacing laptops with smartphones. They are looking seriously at it and planning to research the potential gains in efficiency.