HANNOVER, Germany-After a year of industry enthusiasm and the wild market forecasts that have surrounded the short-range wireless technology Bluetooth, the silicon-chip developers used the giant CeBIT 2000 exhibition to unveil products that appear to provide the first step on the path toward implementation.
Key to the success of Bluetooth is the size, power consumption and cost of the chipset needed to enable wireless communications between devices such as cell phones and laptop PCs. Cambridge Silicon Radio (CSR) and Alcatel both claimed at CeBIT to be first to announce production-ready “single chip” designs, although CSR said its silicon will be fit for volume production by mid-2000, six months ahead of Alcatel. CSR also maintains it has removed another barrier to adoption by reaching the goal of US$5 per chipset, long before the date predicted by many industry analysts.
Bluetooth was also given public support by Kurt Hellstrom, Ericsson’s president. During a somewhat clumsy analysts’ conference, Hellstrom strongly advocated that Bluetooth is now the company’s preferred technology for short-range wireless communication. He positioned DECT-a technology that has been long-championed by Ericsson, together with the notion of a miniature GSM-based base station in the home-as now being sidelined in favor of Bluetooth.
However, while the likes of NEC and Microsoft also used CeBIT to announce Bluetooth chipset deals, the technology has a number of significant hurdles to jump prior to gaining the widespread acceptance of the consumer electronics industry. Most worrying for Bluetooth supporters is the expectation within the electronics industry and consumer market that the technology will be ready to serve a multitude of applications from day one.
Bluetooth is built on the premise that devices, from approved manufacturers and fitted with the technology, will be able to interrogate and communicate with each other. Given that the Bluetooth radio standard has already been established, the issue of seamless communications between Bluetooth-enabled devices will need to take place at an application level.
These applications, or profiles, are being agreed upon by working groups established within the Bluetooth Special Interest Group (BSIG), which now numbers more than 1,500 companies. Each profile needs to fix how, for instance, a cell phone will communicate with a laptop, printer, fax machine, CD player and other devices, and conversely, how a PDA will pass a telephone contact list to a cell phone or fax machine. The permutations are numerous, complex by nature and need to be agreed on by the working groups of BSIG members, which is not an easy or rapid process.
Mike Wehrs, Microsoft’s group manager for mobile devices and a Bluetooth evangelist, recognizes the potential for the technology to disappoint in the early days following its launch. “There are 15 working groups within the BSIG. The number is expanding, and each application profile has an assigned working group to agree (on) the specification and iron out any problems.”
This lowly number of profiles-and it could be less than 10 until sometime early in 2001-seems likely to restrict Bluetooth to initially operating in the cell phone, headphone and laptop arena during its early months.
Wehrs confirmed that Microsoft is now committed to Bluetooth, after standing on the sidelines for many months, and said that there will be a Bluetooth application programming interface (API) across all Microsoft platforms, with a defined set of profiles. However, he declined to commit to when these would be available, cautioning that implementing Bluetooth could be an issue because it “touches and invades” any existing application that needs to be enabled with the technology.
Despite this unusual circumspection from Microsoft, Anders Edlund, marketing director of Ericsson’s Bluetooth division, has stated that forecasts produced by the market research firm Frost & Sullivan that some 10 million Bluetooth devices would be sold in 2000 are probably correct. Joining the band of soothsayers, Edlund believes that estimates of 45 million Bluetooth units sold in 2001 are conservative, and expects some 500 million to 1 billion devices using Bluetooth technology to be sold annually from 2005.
