Columnists

FROM EDN EUROPE: Bluetooth, the second time around

By Graham Prophet, Editor -- EDN Europe, 7/10/2003

Sidebars:
A footnote to history

Are you ready for another gateway? You know, perhaps, about the small-office/home-office gateway or the home gateway—those boxes that provide a broadband access point to the external communications infrastructure and make that bandwidth available and accessible to the assorted items of communicating hardware in their respective domains. Now, meet the PMG (personal mobile gateway). It was much in evidence at June's Bluetooth World Congress, with companies such as IXI Mobile (www.ixi.com) promoting it.

A 2.5G or 3G cell phone is the PHY (physical-media access) for a PMG, and assorted gizmos around your person connect to it wirelessly via Bluetooth. In other words, it is the access point for your "personal- area network." The phone stays in your pocket; when someone calls, the LCD on your Bluetooth watch tells you who it is. You can slip on your Bluetooth headset to speak to the caller, or you can jot a note to the caller with your Bluetooth pen (for example, Logitech's IO pen (www.logitech.com)) on the location-coded paper conceived by Anoto (www.anoto.com). Or, you can send a text message on your Smart Modular Technologies (www.smartm.com) pocket terminal. You can also stream MP3 music to your Bluetooth-connected earphones. You get the idea. These applications represent just one strand that the congress is exploring along with many more applications in the consumer and industrial arenas and most fervently in the automotive space.

But, Bluetooth? Wasn't that an idea swamped in a wave of excessive hype, and haven't other technologies superseded it? The mood of the June meeting was that Bluetooth suffered in its "first phase" from overambitious promotion and from negative factors, such as the failure of some first-round silicon to meet price and performance targets, the high initial cost of qualifying products, and variable results in product interconnectivity, but now it has now found its niche and is ready to take off. In a keynote speech, Masanobu Yoshida, president of Sony's handheld-computing division, presented a chart that graphed Bluetooth activity as a steep initial rise, followed by a sharp dip, mimicking the mood at the meeting. Yoshida holds that the graph is now securely back to a rising trend. Key factors include fixing all Bluetooth's aforementioned problems and others. (Pricing for single-chip or modular solutions has at last breached the famous $5 point.) More good news is that Version 1.2 of the standard is now all but complete in its final testing phase.

Version 1.2 progresses the Bluetooth standard in a number of areas. Critically, it includes the AFH (adaptive-frequency-hopping) feature, which allows the technology to coexist with IEEE 802.11b, or WiFi (Wireless Fidelity). The need for this feature was amply demonstrated on the show floor, where more than a few exhibitors—using non-AFH systems—found difficulty connecting to their own demonstrations from one side of the booth to the other. Typical comments were, "It's very noisy in here," and "There's a WiFi node around here somewhere"—not an ideal demonstration of a standard that promotes universal interconnectivity.

Assuming that these issues are fixed, Bluetooth may be set for the rapid growth that its proponents have longed for. Bluetooth enthusiasts will say that its niche is now well-established and different from higher bandwidth (and more expensive) wireless options, such as 802.11 in all its variants.

If you need a wireless-data connection as fast as 700 kbps at a very low price, Bluetooth might have matured enough to be a contender. The attention given in the first round of Bluetooth-system development to designs at the chip level may have obscured the fact that there are now multiple sources of packaged modular solutions that can allow you to (almost literally) "drop in" a prequalified wireless link. As ever, the Bluetooth Special Interest Group's Web site (www.bluetooth.com) is a good starting point.

Contact me at gprophet@reedbusiness.com.

A footnote to history

A report in my e-mail inbox predicts the imminent demise of the VCR. It notes that consumers are rapidly becoming more aware of the existence of recordable DVDs, which, though still expensive, are on the usual declining pricing curve. Consumers, the report notes, are attracted by DVDs' more convenient format and better performance. Add to these features the increased availability of personal video recorders—still to make a real impact in Europe but with us just the same—with compressed programme material that you save to a disc, and there's no real surprise that the VCR may not be a viable product much longer. Consider, however, what we will lose: a calibration standard, a benchmark. Ever since its introduction, the VCR has provided the reference level against which to judge incompetence in the operation of consumer appliances. When we are no longer able to pass judgment on someone's technical savvy by saying that they "can't even program the VCR," where will we find the new low-water mark of competence to operate the gadgetry of the 21st century?