Packet Switching Types: ATM, Frame Relay, TCP/IP, X.25

Transmission: SONET T-Carrier

Services: [3G] [4G] [Bluetooth] [I-Mode] [WAP] [Wireless and packet switching]

Bluetooth

"What's the next big thing, Zippy?" You mean after oxygen bars, five dollar coffee, and cell phone implants? "I didn't know they had cell phone implants." Oh, yeah, my left elbow is dissing Leo Decaprio in an online chat room as we dine. "What will television be like in th' future Zippy?" Like this.

"In his brilliant novel The Futurological Congress, Stanislaw Lem gives a nightmare cameo which I can't get out of my mind. He describes a group of women sitting in complete silence -- while their handbag computers gossip happily to one another . . ." Arthur C. Clarke (1976)

Bluetooth is a short range radio technology which permits local area networks to be set up instantly among dissimilar devices. Bluetooth enabled laptops, cell phones, desktop computers or PDAs can all communicate with each other as if they were on a wired LAN. There's some confusion about Bluetooth and the other short range protocol 802.11. The latter offers faster throughput but draws more power, is bulkier, and offers less connectivity options than Bluetooth. You could not easily, for example, build the larger component requiring 802.11 into a pair of wireless headphones. Nor perhaps would you want Bluetooth to act as a permanent wireless link between two computers at work. 802.11 is probably best there. So although the two are both short range radio standards, they do different things in different ways. Some makers plan to build both technologies into large equipment like desktop computers. One does not necessarily preclude the other. This technology implies many things.

Short range wireless technologies such as Bluetooth will let inanimate objects: a vending machine, your bookshelf, your sweater, communicate with each other, with computers, and with you. As Negroponte pointed out in Being Digital, machines need to talk to each other to better serve people. Low powered transmitter chips would permit each book in a library, or every product in a warehouse, to "talk" with the shelf they were on, letting a distant computer know its location. Putting the book back in the wrong place, say a shelf on the third floor and not the second, would trigger a trouble report, letting the librarian know where the misfiled book was, allowing easy reshelfing and saving much time. The possible applications are endless.

Here's a good, easy to read introduction of Bluetooth from Iogear: Click here to read their .pdf file. It's from their site: http://www.iogear.com/ (external link). Many pictures.

Although I have not read Muller's title described below, I have read many of his books and they have all been good. Take a look at the sample pages; you'll get a better idea of Bluetooth and Nathan's writing. Also, Bray and Sturman pen an excellent introduction to Bluetooth in the free .pdf file from their book. Make sure to read, it is well detailed.

From Bluetooth Demystified (McGraw-Hill Telecom) by Nathan J. Muller

Introduction and differences between Bluetooth and 802.11 (4 pages, 541K in .pdf)

Good background on transmission and their relation to Bluetooth: spread spectrum, spreading codes, direct sequence, and frequency hopping. Even a picture of Heddy Lamar. (6 pages, 509K in .pdf)

The relation between Bluetooth and coming wireless services like 3G and UMTS (12 pages, 480K in .pdf)

Bluetooth's future is far from blue

November 7, 2003, Arcchart, All Rights Reserved

From Arcchart, always excellent international wireless writing. Good reports. Please visit their site:

http://www.arcchart.com/default.asp (external link)

A couple weeks ago we presented the case for Ultra Wideband (UWB) as a formidable cable replacement technology around the home, connecting printers, camcorders and home entertainment systems wirelessly. In its heyday, this was once seen as another natural domain for Bluetooth, the personal wireless area networking (PWAN) standard. However, from its inception, the standard has been optimised for short-range, low power transmission, making it ideally suited for use in small, portable, personal devices, ranging from handsets to headsets, which are powered by batteries. While UWB has yet to be standardised, and Wi-Fi still hogs battery life, the fact is that Bluetooth will have this portable market to itself for many years to come. This is a view shared by Ariel Moshkovitz, Texas Instruments' Marketing and Business Development Manager for the Short Distance Wireless Business Unit. In a discussion with BluePrint, Moshkovitz explained that Bluetooth penetration in cellular handsets is now set to take-off. We also believe that two of the many profiles that Bluetooth supports, networking and cordless telephone, make it potentially threatening to the cellular operators' voice and data revenues.

A couple of weeks ago we presented the compelling case for Ultra Wideband (internal link) as a formidable cable replacement technology around the home, connecting printers, camcorders and home entertainment systems wirelessly. In its heyday, this was once seen as another natural domain for Bluetooth, the personal wireless area networking standard.

However, this does not mean the end is near for Bluetooth. From its inception, the standard has been optimised for short range (10 metres nominally), low power voice and data communications. This makes it ideally suited for use in small, portable, personal devices, ranging from handsets to headsets, which are powered by batteries (a higher power version, with a range of about 100 metres, exists for powered devices like access points and USB dongles). While UWB has yet to be standardised, and Wi-Fi still hogs battery life, Bluetooth will have this market to itself for many years to come.

This view is shared by Ariel Moshkovitz, Texas Instruments' Marketing and Business Development Manager for the Short Distance Wireless Business Unit. In a discussion with BluePrint, Moshkovitz explained that Bluetooth penetration in cellular handsets is now set to take-off. Arguably, TI is in the best position to see this trend. As the world's largest provider of handset silicon, and with all its reference designs now incorporating Bluetooth technology, the chipmaker has clear visibility on the technology its handset vendor customers intend to deploy over the coming years.

Forrester predicts there will be 286 million Bluetooth-enabled devices in Europe alone by 2008, most of these mobile phones. According to Instat/MDR, Bluetooth chipset shipments will rise from 35.8 million in 2002 to 575 million in 2007. The average selling price for Bluetooth chipsets now sits at around $5. As this drops further, and with chipsets now highly integrated into many handset reference designs, Bluetooth support will be included as standard by handset vendors. Moshkovitz also points to the shortening replacement cycle, now at around 18 months, which will fuel the Bluetooth installed base as consumers upgrade from their non-Bluetooth handsets.

One of Bluetooth's attractive features is its profiles, which were designed to decrease the risk of interoperability problems between different manufacturers' products. A profile is simply a description of how to use a specification to implement a given end-user function. Amongst others, profiles exist for headset, hands-free, dial-up networking, fax, local area networking (LAN), and file transfer.

While consumers are now increasingly becoming familiar with Bluetooth headsets, Bluetooth's plethora of profiles facilitates a range of other cable replacement services: For example, using Bluetooth, a handset can be connected to a desktop PC to sync personal information; make an IP-based LAN connection for Internet access; and act as a cordless telephone (the CTP profile) for voice conversations run over Bluetooth instead of cellular. However, most handsets available today do not support the full range of Bluetooth profiles. CTP, for example, is not supported by any mass-market handset at the moment, although this is likely to change going forward.

The network and cordless telephone profiles have the potential to be particularly disruptive for the mobile network operators (MNOs). For example, connecting to the Internet over Bluetooth allows users to circumvent the cellular network entirely. A P800 for example can be relatively easily configured to surf the web and send emails using a $40 USB Bluetooth adaptor connected to a PC. While Bluetooth's real world connection speed of 700Kbps compares poorly Wi-Fi's 6Mbps, it is almost twenty times as fast as GPRS' 40Kbps.

In a previous BluePrint analysis piece "The hotspot is dead, long live the hotspot", we have discussed how, with such a large installed based of enabled handheld devices, hotspot operators may, in the future, consider adding Bluetooth coverage to their Wi-Fi service. Bluetooth access point specialists have been claiming that some network operators, such as BT, have been examining this option.

While we believe Bluetooth networking does present a threat, TI's Moshkovitz indicates that Bluetooth does present some real opportunities to drive the MNO's cellular data revenue. The peer-to-peer connectivity that Bluetooth offers allows laptop and PDA users to easily connect to the internet using their mobile phone via Bluetooth, encouraging greater data usage.

However, voice cannibalisation from Bluetooth appears to be just around the corner. As mentioned, the CTP Bluetooth profile essentially allows a cellular handset to act as a cordless phone when within range of an appropriate Bluetooth station, which will grab the conversation and route it through the PSTN (public switched telephone network). Several operators are now looking at offering residential customers this service, amongst them, the UK incumbent, BT. Under its Bluephone project, the company has been trialing such a service with a propriety evolution of CTP called MSP (Mobile Services Profile) with a Bluetooth handsets. Central to Bluephone is the ability to seamlessly handover to a GSM cellular network when the caller moves away from their home and out of range of the domestic Bluetooth access point. The CTP profile does not natively enable handover between a fixed and cellular network, but this is an issue BT believes it can successful tackle and anticipates launching the service in the second half of 2004.

Of course, the threat of voice revenue erosion for the MNOs is reduced if they are able to offer a similar cordless/cellular phone service themselves, and mmO2 and Orange have both announced their intention to enable fixed to mobile convergence. In addition, Christian Borrman, CEO of Virtuser, highlights that owning the SIM and the handset is a key weapon in the MNO or MVNO's armoury.

There is no doubt that Bluetooth is here to stay and, as Moshkovitz points out, when UWB does eventually arrive, it will find itself swimming in a sea of Bluetooth. UWB will carve out a position as a wireless cable replacement technology for short-range, high bandwidth applications and is likely to find several applications throughout the home. But, at least in the medium-term, Bluetooth and UWB will happily co-exist.

http://www.arcchart.com/default.asp (external link)

Teething pains

Despite a spate of new Bluetooth devices, the short-range wireless networking technology has yet to live up to its promises.

By Hiawatha Brayk, Globe Staff, 11/11/2002 All rights reserved. Copyright the Globe

The Dell laptop's in one room, the Hewlett-Packard inkjet printer in another. Between them are just a wall, a door and some air - no wires.

And yet, at the touch of a button, the printer cranks out a document stored on the laptop's hard drive. It's a moment of sweet vindication for the Swedish engineers who, eight years ago, invented the short-range wireless networking system known as Bluetooth.

Designed to eliminate the need for short runs of cable between computers and their peripheral devices, Bluetooth has been hailed for years as the networking system of the future. And to judge by a sudden explosion of Bluetooth-based computers, phones, printers, and personal digital assistants (PDAs), the future has finally arrived.

Or has it? A couple of weeks spent with a variety of Bluetooth devices reveals that the technology still doesn't live up to its promise.

The original goal was to create a wireless networking system so simple that the user would have to do almost nothing to make it work. At the touch of a button, a Bluetooth PDA like the new Tungsten from Palm Inc. would download the day's appointments and to-do items from a Bluetooth-equipped laptop. Or a Bluetooth cellphone would be able to dial into the Internet, and feed incoming data to that Bluetooth laptop.

In practice, it's not so simple. Despite years of efforts to create a set of global Bluetooth standards, many of the devices just won't work with each other. Even when they are made to work, the setup process is often so confusing, and the performance so inconsistent, that many consumers will throw up their hands and go back to using old-fashioned wires.

Martin Reynolds, who tracks Bluetooth technology as an analyst for market research firm Gartner Inc., has learned about Bluetooth bugs the hard way. Reynolds spent 90 minutes getting an Ericsson T68 Bluetooth phone to communicate with his wife's Bluetooth-equipped home computer. Mike McCamon, executive director of the Bluetooth Special Interest Group, which oversees Bluetooth technical standards, says initial setup should take just five minutes.

Still, Reynolds says he was delighted with the system at first. Bluetooth let him exchange phone numbers and appointment data between the phone and the computer with ease.

''It just worked,'' said Reynolds. ''The problem is it only just worked the one evening, and it hasn't worked since. ... I don't know why. It just doesn't do it.''

The Bluetooth devices sent to the Globe for a tryout suffered from the same unpredictable, inconsistent performance. Microsoft Corp.'s new Bluetooth keyboard and mouse worked perfectly after a fairly easy setup process. The system includes a Bluetooth transceiver which, according to Microsoft, will allow the user to connect up to five other Bluetooth devices to the computer - including devices not made by Microsoft.

Indeed, that's a vital part of the Bluetooth appeal. Like the Universal Serial Bus (USB) cables used today to link printers to PCs, Bluetooth is supposed to be a universal standard. Any Bluetooth-equipped device should work with any other, regardless of brand.

Not this time. Microsoft's software detected the presence of the Hewlett-Packard printer, but resolutely refused to work with it. By contrast, a Globe-issued Dell laptop with a Bluetooth transceiver from 3Com Corp. was able to use the printer. A spokeswoman for Hewlett-Packard revealed the surprising reason: HP's Bluetooth printer isn't compatible with Microsoft's version of Bluetooth. The two companies are working on an upgrade, due early next year. This kind of incompatibility simply isn't supposed to happen - but it does.

Neither the 3Com Bluetooth card nor the Microsoft transceiver worked with the Palm Tungsten, a PDA with built-in Bluetooth. The 3Com card detected the presence of the Tungsten but refused to synch up the laptop with the handheld device.

The same Globe laptop could connect with a Sony Ericsson Bluetooth phone, but couldn't exchange information with it. A Nokia Bluetooth phone was difficult to set up, but eventually allowed the laptop to connect wirelessly to the Internet and pull down Web pages. However, it wouldn't synchronize with the laptop's address book.

Bluetooth wireless headsets for cellphones are a bright spot. One unit, the FreeSpeak by Jabra Corp., plugs into phones that don't contain a Bluetooth system. It features a transceiver that clips onto the user's belt, and a headset that attaches to the ear. This device worked flawlessly, as did the Bluetooth headset that came with the Sony Ericsson phone.

On the other hand, we couldn't use the headsets to connect to the Bluetooth-equipped laptop. That's a shame, because a wireless headset could be used with PC speech-recognition software, like IBM Corp.'s ViaVoice, in place of the usual wired microphone.

Still, these wireless Bluetooth headsets and phones are one area where Bluetooth lives up to its ease-of-use promise. Perhaps that's because the technology's inventor, Ericsson, is one of the leading cellphone makers. Or maybe it's because so many cellphone companies have embraced the technology. Eric Janson, vice president of worldwide marketing for Cambridge Silicon Radio Inc., a British maker of Bluetooth chips, says that about 25 million chipsets have been sold so far, with the great majority going to cellphone companies like Nokia and Ericsson.

Janson said that other Bluetooth gear has lagged because of foot-dragging in the personal computer industry. Microsoft didn't add Bluetooth compatibility to its Windows XP operating system until a few months ago. Microsoft said this was because there were few Bluetooth products on the market at the time Windows XP was released last year.

Now Windows XP users can get Bluetooth support by installing a free ''service pack,'' available from Microsoft. Apple Computer Inc. already has Bluetooth support in its Mac OS X software, but because so few people use Macs, Bluetooth couldn't take off until Microsoft got aboard.

''It has taken longer than the initial hype, just like any other standard that comes along,'' Janson admits. And now that PCs and Macs support Bluetooth, device makers will have to get serious about making sure that all their Bluetooth devices meet reasonable standards for ease of use and reliability.

McCamon of the Bluetooth Special Interest Group said that he held ''an all-hands meeting'' of top Bluetooth device makers in early October to lay down the law.

If McCamon didn't get their attention, some new competition might. Cypress Semiconductor Corp. of San Jose, Calif., says their new WirelessUSB technology will perform many of the same functions of Bluetooth, but with greater ease.

''It's a lot simpler than what Bluetooth promises and tries to deliver,'' said Cathal Phelan, vice president of Cypress' personal communications division. ''We've reduced the requirements and delivered something that actually does work.''

One reason for Bluetooth's complexity is that each device has to carry a set of software ''profiles'' telling it how to talk to other devices, such as printers, PDAs or phones. WirelessUSB dispenses with all this. It's strictly seen as a substitute for today's USB cables. The transceiver in a WirelessUSB keyboard would broadcast the same signal that would be sent down a standard USB wire, with encryption added to prevent eavesdropping. To the computer on the other end, it all looks like a standard USB connection.

Phelan said that WirelessUSB devices aren't intended to replace Bluetooth in all applications. Indeed, the technology is mainly meant for keyboards, mice, and joysticks. But if the system is reliable and easy to use, it could become a major rival to Bluetooth.

WirelessUSB devices are supposed to hit the market by the middle of next year. Bluetooth device makers have already had about eight years to tinker with their technology. Maybe given six more months, they'll finally get it right.

This story ran on page C1 of the Boston Globe on 11/11/2002. © Copyright 2002 Globe Newspaper Company.

The Telephone's First Century -- and Beyond: Essays on the Occasion of the 100th Anniversary of Telephone Communications by Arthur C. Clarke, Michael Dertouzos, Morris Halle, Ithiel de Sola Pool, Jerome B. Wiesner T.Y. Crowe, ed. Crowell, with AT&T New York 1977 p.100 ISBN #: 0690014856

[3G] [4G] [Bluetooth] [I-Mode] [WAP] [Wireless and packet switching]

Packet Switching Types: ATM, Frame Relay, TCP/IP, X.25

Transmission: SONET T-Carrier

Services: [3G] [4G] [Bluetooth] [I-Mode] [WAP] [Wireless and packet switching]