Most wireless standards lie. Or, to be fair, they tend to be quiet about the fact that when they quote their performance or their features, everything is quoted at its best or maximum value. In real life, many of these are mutually exclusive, or are compromised or affected by the environment in which they are used. Range is invariably a trade-off with data throughput. Both of them are trade-offs with power consumption. And so on. In this chapter we'll look at the major parameters of wireless and how they interact with each other.

One important thing to understand is that most of the wireless standards we're covering have more in common than is generally recognised. Each has been optimised to do some particular jobs very well (generally their main application), but all of them can cope with lots of other applications. The problem facing product designers, once they move away from these obvious applications, is deciding which wireless standard best suits their needs.

In this chapter I'll look at the basic features a designer needs to think about in making this choice. It will give you an understanding of the trade-offs that exist and help you to ask the right questions both in your design team and to any supplier of wireless technology. Even if you know which wireless standard you want to use, it lets you start the process of optimising your design, by seeing how the different parameters affect each other.