Belkin Bluetooth Access Point

Belkin Bluetooth Access Point

Wireless networking doesn't always mean 802.11b or g a growing number of devices are Bluetooth enabled and the mobile communication market has taken the standard on board wholeheartedly. Mobile phones, headsets and PDA's are able to connect over relatively short distances (typically 10 meters) but this is ideal for home networking and with a speed of 1mbit/s data interchange is twice the speed of your average ADSL connection. However Bluetooth Piconet's are not normally joined to a wireless LAN which reduces the benefit of both networks, after all being able to connect your phone's to a network of PC's would bring benefits of voice / text gateways from any networked device and Bluetooth is ideally suited to connecting headsets to PC's, even printers can be connected to Bluetooth and a number are Bluetooth ready when shipped. With this in mind Belkin have produced a Bluetooth access point, this gives the same feature set as a Wifi access point but allows the bridging of a piconet with your wireless and fixed LAN. The Belkin Bluetooth Access Point will support up to 8 networked devices which are each "paired" with the access point, this is achieved through the web browser based GUI and administration portal here the 128bit encryption can be enabled and pass codes entered to facilitate pairing, after the process is complete all devices can see the access point. The access point is in fact a class one Bluetooth device which will support up to 100 meters of Bluetooth transmission but in reality many of the devices you will connect will use the lower class 2 (10 meter) standard, it also has a USB connection and a 100baseT Ethernet connection for bridging to your LAN. The access point also runs its own DHCP pool so it can allocated MAC address to devices , it is possible to manage this through the administration GUI but there is rarely the need. Bluetooth is a more than adequate bearer for your ADSL link, using the Belkin Bluetooth access point your can share your ADSL connection with connected Bluetooth devices, this is a good way to connect a PDA to the web or even a smartphone. The Belkin also comes with an inbuilt print server which allows you to send print jobs from any networked device via the USB port to your printer. This works but can be a little fiddly to setup and things like killing print jobs in the queue are next to impossible we had a suspicion that this may be linked to Belkin print server fighting the Epsom software on our main machine, but were unable to prove this in the short time we had the unit. The Belkin Bluetooth Access point offers a way to bridge Wifi and Bluetooth networks at a budget price (£90) the print server is a nice extra if it works for you and the added range of a class 1 device will get you through a few more walls in the house. Our brief time with the Belkin proved a challenge with lots of head scratching but once it worked it worked well and we could see just how useful it could be, we guess its a good job that Belkin tech support is one of the better services in the UK. Overall this is a Bluetooth Access Point with a lot going for it, that is if you are prepared for the fight to get it working.