Not one but two new Bluetooth standards promised for high data rates

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Not one but two new Bluetooth standards promised for high data rates

By CAROLINE GABRIEL

Published: 8 December, 2008

READ MORE: Bluetooth

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 plans to release a new version of its platform in mid-2009.

Although this was originally expected to be called Bluetooth 2.2, the body that controls the technology - Bluetooth Special Interest Group (SIG) - now plans to rechristen it High Speed Bluetooth, 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.

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 instal 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.