Bluetooth Tethering

The iPad has found a permanent place in my computer bag. After experimenting with the 12" model, I finally settled with the 10.5" one. It fits better on a crowded hotel conference room table as well as on a airplane coach seat table. During conference calls and committee meetings it serves me perfectly as a 2nd screen for the Lenovo Windows laptop. I can move a WebEx window to it or use it as an auxiliary screen when sharing the main one. This is a very convenient setup.

Living almost permanently on a road it is also important to organize connectivity, and while WiFi is prevalent in many places, there are situations when it is not. Such as recently on a high speed train from Switzerland to France. I used to use the WiFi tethering option an Android phone offers, but that has one significant drawback: it consumes a lot of power, draining the phone battery fast. Even the ultra long lasting Blackberry KeyOne is affected.

But Android offers another tethering option - using Bluetooth instead of WiFi. Although this uses Bluetooth EDR, not LE, the power consumption still should be much lower. With the iPAD setting Bluetooth tethering up was as easy as it gets. Pair the phone and the iPad, enable tethering, connect. It just works. Windows, however, has been a completely different story. It took me almost two hours, multiple reboots, searching the Web, to finally arrive with a working solution. Once set up it is rock steady. But I feel I have just become a member of a very exclusive club of people who connect their Windows laptops to the Internet via a phone over Bluetooth.

To save you time and effort, here is the recipe:

In [Control Panel] > [Devices and Printers] > when you right click it on a paired phone and select [Connect Using], you will find [Direct Connection]. This is not what we need. To fix it, remove the paired phone on the Windows machine. In the Android Bluetooth Settings "Forget" your Windows machine. Restart Windows. Set the phone to be discoverable over Bluetooth. When Windows is up, Go to [Control Panel] > [Devices and Printers] > [Add a device]. Windows will search for a while and find the Bluetooth device (your phone). Select it, match the verification codes as usual when pairing and let Windows "install it" (it will take a few more seconds with a progress bar). Restart Windows again. Now when you go to [Devices and Printers] and select the paired phone and right click and select [Connect Using], you should have [Access Point] instead of [Direct Connection]. Select [Access Point] and you are connected. Welcome to the elite PAN club! 

The speeds are of course lower than over WiFi (provided your LTE uplink is fast), but I found them perfectly adequate for typical tasks like web browsing, sorting through email etc. They average around 1-1.5 Mbps (theoretical throughput is 3Mbps) and drop to about half of that when using Bluetooth to stream audio. The good nes is it is very stable, capable of running the Bluetooth PAN network with multiple devices and using other Bluetooth services simultaneously (a Bluetooth mouse connected to the Windows machine and the phone streaming audio to wireless airbuds.

All well done from the Bluetooth standard perspective, but the Windows setup issue is a crack on this nice picture. This problem underlines the importance of platforms. Humans often form their relationship with Bluetooth products through their favorite platform - be it Android or iOS or OSx or Windows. Humans often use multiple Bluetooth products via their platforms. Consequently a defect or a UI/UX problem in how the platform handles Bluetooth has a profound impact on the user’s opinion of Bluetooth and thus the brand, far more so than if they had a fault with one of their peripheral devices. We as the industry have to fix it. A technology is only as great as it can be used or accessed, and this is usually defined by a platform.