The Bluetooth short range wireless standard has been in something of a holding pattern recently, despite its huge installed base in cellphones, and there has been much speculation that it would be squeezed out by emerging alternatives like UltraWideBand. However, with those new personal area network technologies slow to achieve maturity, Bluetooth can reassert its position, and is working on a major new version of its platform, which should be finalized by the end of 2009.
The next Bluetooth release was originally touted to be called 2.2, but the body that controls the technology ‘ Bluetooth Special Interest Group (SIG) ‘ will call this new version High Speed Bluetooth or Bluetooth 3.0, to stress that this will be a major new release, not just a step update, and that it will be geared to high data rate applications, where UWB hopes to shine. There may still be an interim update called 2.2 during 2009, and in addition to the work on high data rate variants, the SIG is also involved in a project for ultra-low power standards.
The group has not commented on targeted timescales for High Speed Bluetooth, though it made it clear that press reports earlier this week had jumped the gun in placing the release date at mid-2009. This is more likely to be the timing for any 2.2 step update, with finalization of 3.0 to follow by year end.
In order to achieve this – and stake its claim to the mobile device’s growing role as the controller of the broadband wireless media network – the SIG seems to have come to a rapprochement with the UWB community. In 2007, the group said it would use a UWB physical layer, based on the emerging WiMedia standard, in 2.2, in order to boost data rates. It then got cold feet as WiMedia failed to achieve the market weight and performance it had promised, and decided to use Wi-Fi instead. But now, IMS Research has discovered that High Speed Bluetooth will come in two versions, one based on each of the other wireless standards, and bringing Bluetooth into line with two major platforms, rather than setting it up against them.
The Wi-Fi implementation will be called High Speed Bluetooth 10x while the UWB version will be 100x. Target applications will be wireless video streaming, wireless printing, and functions that put the cellphone at the heart of the home media network. Bluetooth 10x should take off more rapidly since most smartphones already have Bluetooth radios, while the success of 100x will depend on phonemakers agreeing to install UWB radios too ‘ something that may be encouraged by the promise of High Speed Bluetooth, but which will require the UWB chipmakers to deliver on low cost, high performance and advanced integration promises. IMS sees Bluetooth 100x taking off in force from 2013.
The two-step development plan was first revealed a year ago, when the SIG decided to create protocols that would enable Bluetooth to use Wi-Fi as a transport. This was presented by the group as a stopgap option before their first choice, UWB, was mature, but there was always the prospect that, if Bluetooth over Wi-Fi were widely adopted, that could shrink, or at least delay, the addressable market for a UWB version, except in applications that require extremely high speeds.
We have got to be realistic,” said John Barr, chairman of the SIG’s board of directors, and director of standards realization at Motorola, at the time. “UltraWideBand silicon vendors are not delivering anything close to what they have promised.”
Earlier that year, the Bluetooth SIG had turned its attention to very low power applications, where other standards like ZigBee have been more prominent, and embraced a Nokia inspired low power platform, Wibree. This work is likely to emerge in new Bluetooth releases later in 2009.
Wibree was developed by Nokia in 2001 and launched into the market in 2006. Although there were fears it would be presented as a vendor controlled alternative to Bluetooth, it works better as a complement, since it addresses devices with extremely low power capacity such as watches and heart rate monitors. Bluetooth is really too power hungry for such minute gadgets (it uses 10 times more power than Wibree), but a combination with higher powered cellphones could drive applications such as health monitoring for the elderly. WiBree shares many of the characteristics of Bluetooth, with a range of 30 feet, 1Mbps data rates and operating in the 2.4GHz license-exempt band. Like the older system, it is based on variable length packets that deliver low data rates. Early backers included Broadcom, Bluetooth chip leader CSR, Epson and Nordic Semiconductor.
Other important facets of the Bluetooth roadmap are improved security features, advanced topologies and better quality of service. Some new features in Seattle will include multicast support so that data can be sent to multiple end points simultaneously, eSCO air mode negotiation for renegotiation and seamless switching of the air mode, and AES security.