After being widely booed and criticized last year, Bluetooth is finally here—big time. In fact, last year's embarrassment is today's cool trend and "must have" technology. Now, everyone wants to get on the Bluetooth bandwagon.
All the hype and vaporware of the past few years really confused prospective users and delayed the adoption of Bluetooth. Yes, it took time for Bluetooth to come to market. But Bluetooth has grown, matured, and been fine-tuned. In its current form, version 1.1, the standard is stable, and earlier bugs have been corrected. The IEEE just recently adopted and approved the Bluetooth protocol under its WPAN standards (IEEE 802.15.1).
To confuse matters more, some said Bluetooth directly competed with the IEEE 802.11b WLAN standard. This early misinformation caused some designers to pause and worry about making the wrong choice. The fact is that the two technologies are fully complementary and compatible because they were designed for different applications.
The big concern was interference because they share the same frequency band. Other wireless services occupying the 2.4-GHz ISM band include cordless telephones, microwave ovens, HomeRF LANs, and the forthcoming Bluetooth competitor, ZigBee (see "Wireless PAN Alternatives To Bluetooth," p. 70). You would think that with millions of Bluetooth-enabled products piled on, nothing would work, except for microwave ovens. Yet due to Bluetooth's very low power and short range, that interference probably won't prevent Bluetooth or any of those other services from being successful.
It also was argued that Bluetooth wouldn't be viable unless the BOM price dropped below $5. A few chip-set vendors are nearing that price point in very high volume. Today, the total cost of a Bluetooth interface is more like $20 to $35, although that hasn't stopped companies from incorporating Bluetooth into products. The cost of wireless can be justified in high-end products or where wireless is an essential feature.
As for the future, the Bluetooth Special Interest Group is working on a compatible next-generation version, called Radio2, that will operate at 3 Mbits/s instead of the current 1-Mbit/s raw rate. A 12-Mbit/s version has also been mentioned. Meanwhile, engineers are designing Bluetooth into products daily to deliver millions of chip sets annually. Figure 1 shows the positive forecasts made by research firm Frost & Sullivan for Bluetooth.
Waves Of Applications: Bluetooth products seem to be coming in waves. Real Bluetooth-enabled products first showed up in 2001. But a flood of new Bluetooth products is appearing this year, and more are on the way.
Currently, the biggest application is wireless cell-phone headsets. All major cell-phone manufacturers now have Bluetooth-enabled headset models. Another cell-phone application is a link to a laptop for e-mail and Internet access. This is a better option than trying to use e-mail and the Internet via a tiny 2.5G or 3G cell-phone screen, or even a PDA.
Leading the second wave of products are wireless printer connections. Several companies make a Bluetooth-enabled printer interface, such as 3Com's PC card and PC interfaces (Fig. 2). Also, Hewlett-Packard has a Bluetooth printer (Deskjet 995c). Other PC applications are wireless mouse and keyboard connections, thanks to Microsoft, which now provides Windows support for these devices. Apple's OS-X supports Bluetooth too. Of course, Bluetooth-enabled laptops and PDAs can now link wirelessly to others by using the piconet capability to form an ad hoc network in a meeting. A piconet is an informal, automatically established network of up to eight users whose Bluetooth devices are within range of one another.
The third big wave of Bluetooth products will hit consumer applications. A few examples include wireless MP3 players, wireless stereo headphones for audio and multimedia entertainment centers, and wireless links for digital cameras and game controllers. You will soon see Bluetooth in automotive telematics applications.
While Bluetooth hasn't really shown up in any industrial applications, it certainly has potential. Wireless data acquisition and remote control could benefit. The cost of wiring in an industrial setting is astronomical (hundreds of dollars per foot) given the standards, safety requirements, and hostile environment, not to mention the high cost of labor to lay conduit and cable. It may seem like a silly move to replace a cable with a complicated wireless data system, but you can frequently save big bucks. Although Bluetooth might be a bit of overkill for some industrial applications, the high volume of usage should lower the price to a very attractive level, overkill or not.
Oh, yes, one other thing: When addressing your application, you constantly have to ask yourself, why would anyone want to buy your product over the competition? What are you doing to make your product better and unique to differentiate it from the pack?
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