Features

Opinion: where Bluetooth is going next

For those that may have wondered,(writes Andrew Chalmers) Bluetooth was a 10th century Danish Viking king who united much of Scandinavia under his banner. Today, Bluetooth has again united disparate camps, and there is great hope he will lead them to great victories and more important, booty and loot!

Originally developed by Ericsson and released as an open platform (hence the Scandinavian derivation), the consortium involved in the development includes 3Com, IBM, Intel, Lucent, Microsoft, Motorolla, Nokia, Siemens, Toshiba, etc. So it's certainly being taken seriously by the heavyweights, and you can be sure a ton of money will be spent to try to make it a success.

Briefly, Bluetooth is a wireless broadcast technology that scans in a 10m radius and automatically detects and connects other Bluetooth enabled devices in that area. These can include PC's, mobile phones, printers, digital cameras, PDA's and even household devices such as your fridge, VCR and so on. The most obvious application is the wireless office, no more wires out of the back of the PC to keyboard, mouse, and printer, and easy synchronisation of desktop, laptop and PDA.

For the more technically inclined, Bluetooth operates on a globally available unlicensed 2.45 GHz radio band that supports data speeds of up to 721 Kbps and three voice channels. Devices are embedded with a short-range transceiver, either directly or through an adapter device such as a PC Card.

To overcome random noise, Bluetooth uses frequency hopping to maintain the link - by hopping to a new frequency after transmitting or receiving each packet. This hopping can be as much as 1,600 times per second over 79 channels, making it highly secure. You can have up to eight Bluetooth devices communicating with each other at one time, which is called a Piconet. You can overlap up to 10 Piconets to form a Scatternet, which would be a total of 80 linked appliances. The Bluetooth protocol only uses 79 channels, so once you go past this number the network will be saturated and will become unreliable.

There are two main hurdles for the success of Bluetooth -

The availability of Bluetooth enabled devices, which is now growing. Toshiba is shipping Bluetooth-enabled PC cards from their Web site, and has been shipping wireless Bluetooth-enabled servers. Late last year Motorola announced its Timeport 270, which accepts a Bluetooth add-on, and a Bluetooth headset for Ericsson's R520 smart phone is available in very limited quantities. Anoto recently unveiled its Bluetooth-based pen that automatically sends handwritten information to any nearby Bluetooth-enabled device such as a computer, a cell phone, or a fax machine. Epson's Stylus Colour 777 colour ink-jet printer will reportedly include a Bluetooth adapter by the end of the year. There are more, but perhaps the most important recent launch is the Palm Pilot Bluetooth enablement extension, a Secure Digital plug-in card.

The second hurdle is competition from rival technologies, including wireless LAN (WLAN), one variety of which - 802.11b - uses the same frequency as Bluetooth; and iMode, which has been a huge success in Japan and has recently launched in Europe.

Two major innovators - Apple and Sun, have both opted out of the Bluetooth program.

By the by, the Bluetooth frequency is also very close to that used by the French military, who have not been known in the past for their subtlety in dealing with perceived infringements ...

Additionally, the short range of 10m is seen as a potential drawback, though developers point out that range can extended by Piconets overlapping and routers can act as range boosters.

I am naturally positively inclined toward any innovation efforts and wish all projects to succeed! However, it may well be a stormy ride ahead for long ship Bluetooth, at least initially. Why? Lack of product availability, slow and potentially expensive rollout, already established rival systems, and technology limitations (range and network size).

However, a great deal of money is being thrown at this in the next two years, and a beach head has certainly been established, and I wouldn't want to bet against the likes of Microsoft, Intel, et al winning this one (as usual!)

Andrew Chalmers is CEO of KeyMS - specialists in bespoke software and solutions.