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308 Part Two Information Technology Infrastructure

WIRELESS COMPUTER NETWORKS AND INTERNET
ACCESS

If you have a laptop computer, you might be able to use it to access the Internet
as you move from room to room in your home or dorm, or table to table in your
university library. An array of technologies provide high-speed wireless access
to the Internet for PCs and other wireless handheld devices as well as for cell
phones. These new high-speed services have extended Internet access to numer-
ous locations that could not be covered by traditional wired Internet services.

Bluetooth
Bluetooth is the popular name for the 802.15 wireless networking standard,
which is useful for creating small personal area networks (PANs). It links
up to eight devices within a 10-meter area using low-power, radio-based
communication and can transmit up to 722 Kbps in the 2.4-GHz band.
Wireless phones, pagers, computers, printers, and computing devices using
Bluetooth communicate with each other and even operate each other without
direct user intervention (see Figure 7.13). For example, a person could direct a
notebook computer to send a document file wirelessly to a printer. Bluetooth
connects wireless keyboards and mice to PCs or cell phones to earpieces
without wires. Bluetooth has low-power requirements, making it appropriate
for battery-powered handheld computers or cell phones.
Although Bluetooth lends itself to personal networking, it has uses in
large corporations. For example, FedEx drivers use Bluetooth to trans-
mit the delivery data captured by their handheld PowerPad computers to
cellular transmitters, which forward the data to corporate comput-
ers. Drivers no longer need to spend time docking their handheld units

FIGURE 7.13 A BLUETOOTH NETWORK (PAN)

Bluetooth enables a variety of devices, including cell phones, smartphones, wireless keyboards and
mice, PCs, and printers, to interact wirelessly with each other within a small 30-foot (10-meter) area.
In addition to the links shown, Bluetooth can be used to network similar devices to send data from
one PC to another, for example.

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