• 
• 
• 
• 

 1 of 4

Gallery

Bluetooth: dead or alive?

Posted on 21 Nov 2002 at 15:36

And all the while, there lurks the spectre of competition - other wireless technologies that promise more for less money.

THE OTHER WAY
In the time since Bluetooth was announced to the world, a number of rival wireless technologies have been unveiled - or, in Ultra Wideband's case, dusted down and given a spring clean.

Ultra Wideband (UWB) is far from a new technology, having been first mooted in the 1950s. It doesn't rely on any one frequency, but spreads its signal across a whole swathe of frequencies. It promises transfer rates up to 500Mb/sec, rivalling USB 2. It also boasts location awareness (similar to GPS) and very low power consumption.

Low cost, low power and low data rate, ZigBee (IEEE-802.15.4) is another standard that could yet prove to be a popular alternative to Bluetooth. It lacks Bluetooth's flexibility, but this means that protocols are simpler, so they should work with similar ease to infrared. At $2 per chip, they're also likely to be cheaper than Bluetooth, which may reach $4, but won't go much lower.

However, ZigBee is yet to be ratified and it's expected to mainly appeal to the home and SoHo user. It's also slow, boasting a 10Kb/sec to 115.2Kb/sec transfer rate compared to the 400Kb/sec to 1Mb/sec of Bluetooth. This means multimedia transfer is out of the question, which is bound to put off the mobile phone community.

And Matthew Towers, managing director of IMS Research, which specialises in wireless technologies research, is unconvinced. 'ZigBee's main advantage is that it's a very low-power solution, but the speed that it offers isn't anywhere near as high as Bluetooth. If it succeeds at all, I can see it in niche applications but not really across the broad range in which Bluetooth is expected to participate,' he said.

'It's still very, very early to say what's going to happen to UWB. My perception is that it's at least three years behind Bluetooth. There are still lots of things that have to be sorted out for UWB - like will it work? And will it work at a reasonable cost? What are the technical issues? Will they be solved? Until we start to get the answers to some of those questions, we don't know if it's going to be a threat. So it's not going to be a threat in the next two or three years and, if Bluetooth hasn't established itself by that time, it's struggling anyway.'

THE CURSE OF 802.11
Bluetooth's biggest rival, in many people's eyes, is 802.11. When Bluetooth was in its early stages, people looked at this unproven technology and 802.11b and declared the latter the winner. It's easy to see why. Bluetooth has a shorter range, a smaller bandwidth and early demonstrations of the actual products were shaky to say the least. In contrast, 802.11 worked well and already had a huge market presence.

'The Bluetooth community didn't help itself by promoting Bluetooth as an all-singing, all-dancing wonder solution that would do anything for anybody,' said Towers. 'But that's changed in the last two or three years. The Bluetooth community has settled down and focused on the area where it's going to be really strong. It's highly likely that many products will include both 802.11b and Bluetooth. Notebooks and desktop PCs are classic examples of what will include both solutions.'

The problem with 802.11 comes when you try to use it out of the office. Yes, an 802.11 notebook can exchange data with an 802.11-equipped PDA, but only as a peer-to-peer network. And you're never going to see an 802.11 radio in a mobile phone, because 802.11's power demands would cripple the talk and standby time.