Headworx

Interference is one of the most important factor defining performance and scalability of wireless networks. When a data packet is sent by a transmitter, it may or may not reach the intended receiver, depending whether it interferes (collides) with another packet or not. I discussed this many times , pointing the compact nature of Bluetooth mesh packets helps these networks scale better. You have asked for precise numbers. Here they are. To make comparisons fair, I took a light dimming message in Bluetooth mesh and Zigbee. The one that is sent to set the dim level of a group of lights to certain value. The shortest form of such message would be 4 bytes (on air we call them octets): 2 octets for the message opcode (dim) and 2 octets for the value (assuming 16-bit resolution). In practice things are a little bit more complicated (Bluetooth mandates sending a transaction identifier and Zigbee mandates sending a transition time (Bluetooth has transition time as optional, as the light may h...

iPhone 12 still has a lightning port. Apple has moved EVERYTHING to USB-C. iPads (even the basic ones; the Pro went USB-C a couple of years ago), the new HomePod mini. Even the new Beats Flex earphones are USB-C. So the software for USB-C is ready (as the iPads prove). The accessories have gone USB-C. MacBooks are entirely USB-C. The iPhone12 is not. How come? I'm not really buying the story they make $$$ licensing the lightning connector. It is peanuts. They make more money by removing a power supply from the iPhone 12 box. So why o why? Perhaps it is as simple as moving to USB-C would delay the schedlue and iPhone 12 would not make it for the "holiday" season. The other conspiracy theory is they want to get rid of any connector in iPhone 13, staying with [the new] MagSafe only. This may have legs, as they might have realized nowadays [most] people use the phone port for charging only. Files are synced from the cloud, sound went Bluetooth a while ago. That means a phone ...

The standard business model in the wireless semiconductor industry has been the silicon vendors charging for their SoCs (Systems on Chip) and offering software stacks for free. The problem is the stacks are of a poor quality. What is worse, they suffer in the areas which are difficult to identify and almost impossible to fix by a typical product company. So trusting the underlying stacks, the vendors continue building products and then ship them, exposing themselves to potentially significant brand damages. If a company X ships a product based on a silicon / stack vendor A or B, and that product fails to perform, it is the X brand that suffers, as neither A nor B brands are identified. X very often has no competencies to judge the performance (or other hidden problems), as they are pushed by A's or B's sales people pitching the products datasheets. The datasheets have a list of features and nobody asks about the performance of the software stack, somehow assuming it all works. ...

The COVID pandemic has a clear impact on videoconferencing solutions. And the outcome has been quite profound so far. First of all it is clearly a technology for the mass market. A simple tablet or a laptop is sufficient, proving the fancy "systems" from the legacy companies like Polycom or Cisco are no longer needed. Then it proves the mobile 4G infrastructure is absolutely sufficient to run high quality video calls. I have been doing just that since the first lockdowns in March. After decommissioning the poorly performing ADSL line I bought a 4G router in a local T-Mobile store and have been running 6-7 hours of teleconferencing calls every day. It is ultra stable, with up/down speeds of 20Mbps and latency around 25ms. Who needs 5G? On the accessories side Jabra absolutely rules with their Jabra Speak line. Nobody comes close, especially for the price they offer. They definitely have some secret sauce when it comes to echo cancellation and voice clarity. And then is the sof...