Bluetooth wireless technology has been heralded for over two years
now but has yet to arrive. This was underlined recently at the
annual Bluetooth Congress in Monaco.
At last year's conference, the great and the good of the Bluetooth
Special Interest Group (SIG) assured everyone that the technology
was going to explode onto the market by Christmas. Unfortunately,
for Bluetooth Christmas never seemed to come and when Microsoft
dropped support from Windows XP Beta 2 it was obvious that the hype
had outstripped the reality.
Only now are there signs of life among Bluetooth suppliers, with
plans for the imminent shipping of a number of devices and the
applications to support them.
One of the specific issues that arose last year was the fact that
Bluetooth's 1.0 radios only started to become available at a time
when everyone was focusing on the follow-up 1.1 radios. This
created a climate of uncertainty as suppliers realised that
customers would be unlikely to adopt a technology that was changing
so rapidly - especially as many of those changes were designed to
fix bugs in the original specification.
There were also significant concerns over the delays in producing
the profiles - the documents that specify how Bluetooth devices
will provide specific services such as printing and personal area
networks (Pans).
While last year's show was more hype than substance, this year's
event offered a marked contrast. Suppliers were showing both
production and beta modules for a variety of applications and they
openly acknowledged what needs to be done to make Bluetooth work.
All of these products are being built on top of the Bluetooth 1.1
radios, and the testing and qualification of products has been
stepped up by all the testing houses. There has also been an
increase in the number of companies looking to become qualified
testing facilities.
Current products encompass both the consumer and professional
markets, with a distinct emphasis on the corporate network sector,
rather than the hands-free mobile phone headset that was billed as
last year's killer device.
However, this does not mean that the consumer focus of Bluetooth
has diminished. The set-top box suppliers, in particular Philips
and Nokia are heavily pushing Bluetooth for the home, especially
for moving digital media such as MP3 files to phones and PDAs.
There is also much more emphasis on the automotive market, which
has been developing Bluetooth to deliver information inside and
outside the vehicle.
One project under development by a major car rental firm will use
Bluetooth devices to reduce the time it takes to give a clean bill
of health to a vehicle when it is returned. This is done by sending
information directly from the car to the check-in desk. As this
information will also contain significant data about critical
engineering components within the car, it should also reduce the
turn around time for a vehicle. Such systems are likely to be made
available to corporate fleet managers within the next three
years.
The network sector has exposed a number of problems for Bluetooth,
especially in its security model. As a result, all of those
suppliers that are offering network products have had to develop
higher-level security products.
However, despite this additional burden, a significant number of
suppliers demonstrated security products at the show, including
complete management suites that allow Bluetooth to be managed
inside the MIS department. One problem with many of these solutions
is that they are being developed ahead of the Pan profile and run
the risk of containing non-standard, proprietary code that will
become an inhibitor to corporate acceptance.
In order to prove that the technology really does work and that
interoperability exists, many suppliers displayed network access
devices in Monaco. Not only did this allow them to show off their
products but it also demonstrated how Bluetooth is maturing towards
a limited early deployment. One supplier, Red-M, was even loaning
devices to delegates so that they could see interoperability in
action as they roamed around the show.
Interoperability is not just limited to Bluetooth products. A
number of suppliers brought along demonstration devices that are
able to roam between Bluetooth, IEEE 802.11 and GSM environments.
For the corporate IT market this is a critical move and, with
802.11 and other wireless technologies being talked about,
Bluetooth needs to prove that it can fall into place in the IT
infrastructure.
More importantly, Bluetooth needs to demonstrate that it will not
suffer from massive degradation due to interference from other
wireless technologies. Although a show cannot replicate a corporate
environment, it does create an area with a high density of devices
- making interference and degradation problems easier to
spot.
There are still some networking issues that need to be addressed.
The current products allow devices to connect to the network and
permit users to synchronise e-mail and other data, but the user has
to be either stationary or moving within the range of the Bluetooth
Access Point. The reason for this is that the Bluetooth SIG has yet
to define how a device can be handed over from one network access
point to another.
One solution to this came from Pico Communications, which
demonstrated a Bluetooth modem that would connect to a Palm or PDA
and provide a fall-back connection whenever the local connection
fails.
As well as the hardware suppliers, Monaco saw a number of
developers offering software. One such was Extended Systems, which
is using Bluetooth with its synchronisation software for PDAs,
palmtops and mobile phones. This gives the company a significant
jump on Microsoft, which has yet to announce when it will provide
Bluetooth support in Activesync, its version of Outlook for mobile
devices.
There are still some significant clouds on Bluetooth's horizon and
the situation has not been helped by Microsoft dropping support for
Bluetooth. The primary reason for Microsoft's decision is that when
it called for hardware to test in March 2001, when Windows XP Beta
2 was being finalised, there were insufficient products available
to make testing worthwhile.
On top of this, Microsoft is concerned that, despite the efforts of
the Bluetooth SIG to set compliance criteria, too many suppliers
are solving outstanding issues with proprietary code. The company
is keen not to be caught between suppliers and users when products
are incompatible.
However, leaving aside the Microsoft situation, the outlook for
Bluetooth is much more positive than it was 12 months ago. The show
saw working products demonstrating interoperability and
applications that would allow Bluetooth to be integrated into the
corporate IT infrastructure. This provides a solid base from which
the technology can begin to develop.
There is no doubt that real, mainstream adoption in both the
business and consumer space is between 12 and 24 months away, but
early adopters need not fear that their products will become
unusable in that time. For those that need to constantly
synchronise data between devices Bluetooth is likely to be a viable
alternative by the end of the year.