Bluetooth's future is far from blue

MOST READ
LATEST NEWS

Compare broadband and
mobile phone deals at Top10.com

EVENTS

4G World 2010 October 18 - 21, Chicago

4GWE Conference, Oct 4-6, Los Angeles

The Location Business Summit USA, 14-15 September, Crowne Plaza, San Jose

Advertize your telecoms job

JOBS

Mobile Industry & Technology Journalist - freelance

HOT TOPICS

Bluetooth's future is far from blue

By MATT LEWIS

Published: 7 November, 2003

READ MORE: Bluetooth

A couple of weeks ago we presented the compelling case for Ultra Wideband 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 portable 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.

Pages: 1 | 2