cat5 to bluetooth

[agug222]

Hi all,

I need to set up a small bluetooth network in my house instead of wifi. I have plenty of cat5 ports around but find it inconvenient. I am shying away from wifi as it can be hacked from a distance.

I was wondering whether their is some sort of adapter that can either be pluged into my cat5 port or on the end of my cat5 cable that will create this network. If so, please place links to the product and, if possible, a step-by-step guide to connecting my laptop to the bluetooth network.

Thanks in advance!

 

[aem]

Hi and welcome to SF.

I do not think bluetooth requires cable connections. If your device has BT capability it's just a matter of turning it on and set things up. There might be BT utility/hotkey for your hardware too but it should be built-in, if not just download it.

Why are u relying on BT, it's use is limited.

 

[agug222]

Thank you responding so quickly aem! I'm trying to find some sort of bluetooth adapter that I can plug into a cat5 socket so that I have a small bluetooth network. Do you know if their is something of this sort?

 

[aem]

Oh ok, depends on what your BT device, what connectors does it have?

 

[agug222]

Well, I have a laptop and a netbook, both with bluetooth capability.

 

[mckillwashere]

Wi-Fi is much more secure.
Bluetooth is also so much slower than wi-fi.

 

[agug222]

The reason I would like to have a bluetooth network is because it has a much smaller range than wifi, therefore having a less chance of being hacked.

 

[mckillwashere]

With wifi you can set power settings, Which limits distance.
Bluetooth uses a four digit passcode.
WiFi uses anywhere from 1-32 or higher.
While bluetooth may have a shorter range, it also has less security, and less bandwidth.

I did some looking around and there is no bluetooth routers or rj-45 connectors.
I check two of my high choice suppliers.

 

[zzz2496]

agug222,

Bluetooth is for device to device communication, as in one way small sized data oriented, cellphones use them to transmit small data to each other (contacts, emails, internet connection sharing, etc). It has somewhat slow connection speed at a very short range (short as in just few feet). The max speed you can get theoretically is around 4Mbits/sec, which translates to around 500kBytes/sec raw speed, cut that around 40% - 50% for connection overhead (BT TCP/IP wrapper, TCP/IP overhead, etc), you get around ~250kBytes/sec at best. That translates to around 40 seconds copying a 10MB file (which is just a flash on wired connection, and less than 6 seconds in Wifi connection).

Wifi on the other hand, although not ideal/reliable/fast/low latency, is MUCH better than Bluetooth. If you're a security freak, use WPA2 with a RADIUS server, it's close to unhackable... at least you can't hack it in 10 years time of brute forcing or so, in the mean time, the encryption key changed every hour (an hour stream of data needs 10 years or more to crack, yet the data becomes invalid in 1 hour time) so it's close to impossible to crack). If you're a security nut, create a VPN connection over your Wifi, that'll fix your paranoia for good, if that's not enough, create VPN in VPN in VPN connection over WPA2+RADIUS encrypted connection.

By the way, there are no such thing as CAT5 -> BT converter... You can convert CAT5->Wifi (using an Access Point), but that's it...

 

[agug222]

Thank you zzz2496 and everyone else for your help. Hopefully now I will be able to convince my folks that wifi can be very safe!