William Webb

So it will depend quite how much it leaks.

So the microwave oven is about a million times more powerful than your Bluetooth transmitter in your handset.

So if only one millionth of the signal gets out of the oven, that's enough to cause some issues with your headset.

I think that's probably enough interference to offset it a bit.

Yeah, so it's actually a real challenge.

So the way that Bluetooth has overcome this is, first of all, to divide up this 2.4 gigahertz band into 80 tiny little sub-bands.

And each device, when it transmits, uses one of those 80 different sub-bands.

So that, in principle, allows lots of different devices to exist.

The problem is they're not coordinated properly.

So you might be using Bluetooth with your phone and your headset, and I might be in the same room using Bluetooth with my phone and my headset, and the two aren't talking to each other.

So it's not that one says to the other, I know, but you have channel 6 and I have channel 8.

They just don't do that.

And so you could well be in a situation where randomly two devices choose the same channel, and then they would interfere with each other.

So what Bluetooth did to overcome that was it adopted something called frequency hopping.

And what that means is that it transmits for quite a short period of time, let's say a millisecond, a thousandth of a second, on one of those channels, say channel one.

And then it will jump to a different one, say channel 10, and then it will jump to another one, channel 20.

And each different Bluetooth device is given a different what's called hopping sequence.

So there is a chance that at any point in time the two will end up on the same channel and they'll interfere.

But for the most part they won't.

If there's only two devices and there's 80 channels and they're both kind of fairly randomly hopping between them, then only one time in 80 will they end up on the same one.