Bluetooth: Up close and personal wireless freedom?

Is it time to throw out all those cables and tape over the infra-red ports? Mark Graham looks at Bluetooth and the prospects for this much-hyped wireless technology.

If asked to explain, you could say Bluetooth is all about history - in two ways.

Let's first consider the charitable, almost cuddly interpretation. The backers of Bluetooth - a personal area wireless networking technology for linking devices such as printers, laptops, PCs and phones - hope it will eventually stamp its mark on history in the same way the Viking King it was named after, Harald Bluetooth, did in the tenth century. Harold is remembered (by some) as the tooth-stained monarch who united Nordic nations under one religion. His is a legacy all about communication in the face of adversity.

Fast forward a millennium, and those companies promoting his namesake technology are also faced with obstacles, if not obvious enemies.

Bluetooth was originally a radio technology developed by Ericsson in 1994 as a replacement for cable-dependent mobile phone accessories. However, seeing the greater potential of its creation, the Swedish company helped form the Bluetooth Special Interest Group (SIG) in June 1998 alongside founder members Intel, IBM, Nokia and Toshiba, and soon other major players including 3Com, Lucent, Microsoft and Motorola. The goal was to enhance the technology and bring it to market within two years. And the growth of the SIG clearly shows Bluetooth's potential - there are now more than 2,000 members.

However, with the SIG came a lot of hype. And part of that hype was a prediction consumers would be using the wireless technology sooner rather than later. In other words, they would in no time be lapping up Bluetooth-enabled devices which could talk - often without prompting - to one another when less than 10m apart, for example connecting a laptop to a mobile phone resting in a coat pocket across a crowded room to get internet access. But the release of Bluetooth-enabled products has been slow.

Andy Craigen, senior manager of wireless applications at Agere (a recent offshoot of Lucent), admitted to silicon.com "a lot of aspects were overstated a couple of years ago".

Colin Ellis, Ericsson's head of production management in the UK, also realises there was a lot of early hype, but now says there is a common sense reason why Bluetooth-enabled products are yet to flood the market. "A conscious decision was made about a year ago to ensure the technology is seamless when it comes out. Rather than racing it to market we decided we needed to get the interoperability sorted out," he said.

Another factor, which has hindered its take up, is whether or not it actually works. In March, at the Cebit tradeshow in Hanover, an attempt to demonstrate the technology in operation on a large scale failed miserably. However, in an interview conducted on his new Bluetooth-enabled Ericsson R520 handset, Dave Curl, head of communications at TDK Systems, insisted the technology is viable, saying: "Bluetooth is advancing now faster than it ever has before."

A further obstacle slowing Bluetooth's advance is something lovingly known as IEEE.802.11b, a wireless local area network (WLAN) standard that offers superior data transmission speeds of up to 11Mbps. Some users now wonder whether this is the route to go down.

The likes of Agere and Ericsson are hedging their bets. Craigen and Ellis both insist the two technologies will work in separate parts of the market. According to Craigen, what Bluetooth lacks in speed it makes up for in flexibility. "Bluetooth creates ad-hoc wireless networks which allow devices to enter and exit easily. And unlike 802.11b, it does not need to be configured to connect to a transmitter," he said.

That said, many hotspot locations such as airports, hotels and railway stations are installing WLAN transmitters. And significantly, one of the most important SIG members, Microsoft, recently opted to write software interfaces for 802.11b technology rather than Bluetooth into the next version of its Windows operating system, XP.

Analyst house Datamonitor has raised questions about the take up of each technology. Instead, it is mentioning the newer 802.11a as a possible dark horse that will ultimately be more widely accepted.

Tim Gower, an analyst at Datamonitor, forecasts wireless networking will indeed become a major industry in the not too distant future but believes both Bluetooth and 802.11b will be held back by interference issues and low speeds in the 2.4Ghz frequency band.

In contrast, 802.11a operates at a frequency of 5Ghz and should allow faster data transfer. Atheros Communications recently claimed it recorded speeds of up to 72Mbps and this is why Gower thinks it will ultimately be successful.

Questions have also been raised about the security of data with these technologies. Dave Curl from TDK Systems told silicon.com that the industry has worked hard on multilayer security technology and frequency jumping implementations to iron out any vulnerabilities. But there remain concerns.

According to a Gartner report, the number of wireless data users will reach nearly 800 million individuals by 2004, but it still warns that Bluetooth "is a long way from being ready for mass adoption".

In contrast, research firm Allied Business Intelligence estimates that manufactures will ship 1.4 billion Bluetooth products in 2005, which is considerably more than its 20.2 million prediction for 802.11b device shipments.

You could say that Gartner's, and other's, figures support the claims from Agere, Ericsson, TDK and any one of several dozen other companies promising the market will be awash with Bluetooth-enabled products in 2002.

Yet a second historical interpretation of the phrase Bluetooth is less forgiving. It points to a technology tainted by a series of false dawns and over-excitement during the past two years. Problems revolving around equipment production, roll out time frames, security, and arguably competing technologies don't seem to be going away, though the concept remains fundamentally attractive.