Instead of the obvious call for more, I’d like to look back at the many advantages of cables.  As designers rush into wireless, it’s easy to forget what they’re giving up.  Wireless offers new opportunities, but only at the expense of many serious compromises.  In this brave new world of wireless it’s apparent that some people are forgetting those compromises.  In this and the following article I’m going to look at what they are and then address the misconception that wireless standards can be treated in the same way as wired ones, debunking the common misconception that they follow the OSI model.

Once you sign up to the wireless dream, it’s very easy to forget just how good cables are.  Unless you’re pushing through extremely high frequencies (in the range that we’d generally consider to be wireless), or very high throughputs, then cabled range within the home isn’t a problem.  If you want a cable to go farther you just buy another reel of cable.  And for most of the time, throughput’s not much of a problem either.  Compared to wireless standards, cables are fast.  They support throughputs in hundreds of Megabits and Gigabits per second where most wireless standards struggle to get over a few hundred kilobits.

One of the big differences from cables, which many would say is a key advantage of wireless is topology.   This is where wireless becomes non-intuitive, which is both an advantage and a disadvantage.  Topology with cables is easy.  You get the end of the cable, find a mating plug or socket and plug it in.  Instant connectivity - it works.  With wireless you have nothing physical to hold or plug into.  Wireless is cunningly invisible.  To connect it, both ends (and it can be more than two, which is even more complicated) need to start talking to each other.  It’s that dreaded term “pairing”, which is where a large percentage of wireless products fail at the first hurdle.  It also brings us to the next difference - security.

Security is something that you don’t need to bother about with most cables, because the act of plugging them in gives you physical security.  The data that you send stays within the cable and no-one else can access it.  Devotees of spy fiction will point out that you can break in and attach covert listening devices, or even use sensitive radio receivers to listen in to the weak electromagnetic field generated by the data flowing along your cable.  They’re right, but it’s not likely that your neighbour or the local kids will be capable of doing that.  And if they are you’ve probably got more important things to worry about.

With wireless you potentially lose all of that security.  The data you’re sending from your laptop to your router, or your smart meter to your display can be captured by anyone else within range.  (Unlike cables which are strictly point to point, wireless is generally omni-directional.)  That raises two problems - stopping other products masquerading as legitimate device on your network which might send spurious commands, and adds a requirement to encrypt your data, so that if someone else captures some of your transmissions, they can’t decode them.

There is a whole science built up around wireless security, composed of experts who write security algorithms and experts who try to crack them, both for genuine and nefarious reasons.  That’s led to something of a security arms race, where to remain secure ever more complex algorithms and authentication schemes are being developed, which require ever more powerful microprocessors to be built into wireless chips.  These are there just to maintain the security of the cable-replacement link.  Other security, such as the https security the internet uses for credit card purchases has to run on top of these, whether the underlying link is a cable or wireless.

The ever more powerful processors needed to support complex security algorithms bring us to another point of difference - power consumption.  It’s a fallacy to say that cables don’t need power - they have an inherent resistance which needs power to send bits of information, although in most cases it’s very low compared to wireless.  As you send more data, you need to put in processing effort to shape the pulses going down the cable; you also need to terminate the cable to make it behave more like a waveguide, which again needs power.  But you don’t have the overhead of processing for security, nor the fact that wireless is generally transmitting in all directions, even though it’s only receiving in one.  (And anyone who says that MIMO is power efficient has been reading and believing too many marketing manuals.)

Then there’s latency.  It’s an eternal surprise to engineers starting to work with wireless that when you put data into one end of a link it doesn’t immediately pop out of the other.  The IP community is already familiar with the problem, but the magnitude of potential delay can be totally unexpected.  Try listening to a film over a Bluetooth stereo headset to discover what lipsynch is all about.  Latency can often be measured in seconds.

Even when you’ve got your wireless system to work there’s the annoying problem of robustness, which comes down to available spectrum and interference.  That’s not to say that cables can’t suffer from interference.  A well place nuclear explosion can create a very disruptive electromagnetic pulse over a short period, but it’s not something you come across on a daily basis in most domestic environments.  In contrast different wireless standards that share the same limited spectrum get in each other’s way.  Ten years ago, when I first installed Wi-Fi, or 802.11b as it was called then, it worked really well throughout the house and garden.  As all of my neighbours installed it, along with baby monitors and TV sender, the performance degraded to the point where it became worse than useless.  As a result I’ve just wired my house with CAT-5 for Internet access.  It’s a worrying by realistic fact that any in-home wireless system will probably work best on the day you install it, and then get progressively worse as all of your neighbours get one too.

Those are the big physical differences, but there’s a whole host of less tangible ones to consider.  Differences that just don’t exist in the world of cables.  Let’s start with interoperability.  In the cable world that’s mostly down to different plugs and sockets.  Of course there’s fine detail like multiway and coaxial cables and the level of screening, but in most cases you can solder a different connector on and it works.  In contrast there’s absolutely no interoperability between different wireless standards.  Quite often there’s precious little backwards compatibility between the different versions of a single wireless standard.  From a consumer viewpoint that means the product you buy today probably won’t work with the one you bought a few years ago.  With cables there’s pretty good compatibility - at most you need to change the plug or buy an adapter to get several decades of backwards compatibility.  In contrast wireless generally means a complete replacement.  Nice work when you can get it, but not something that endears you to the user.

So why the enthusiasm for wireless?  Mostly because of the Holy Grail of simplicity that it purports to offer.  Simplicity of installation (no wires or holes in walls), simplicity of commissioning (no need to connect cables to inaccessible sockets), simplicity of mobility (you can carry devices around and connect to different things in difference places).  But it’s really difficult getting all of that to work.

To put back the basics of a cable - throughput, range, security, latency ease of connection, all of the things I’ve talked about above, is an immensely difficult task.  You can specify most cables on a single sheet of paper.  In comparison most wireless standards require several thousand pages of technical specification.  And even then each standard is a compromise, making its individual choice of what is important for a specific application.  Each one takes hundreds of man years of effort to write, test and turn into reality. 

Which adds another complication.  To make this complexity work requires some highly talented companies and individuals.  All of them contribute their ideas and patents into a standard.  Which means that all wireless standards involve some form of IP license or certification requirement.  That means you either need to pay money to join the standards group if you want to use it in your products, pay someone a license fee, or pay a test house to certify it before you’re allowed to ship it.  After which you may discover you’re not allowed to export it, as some of the high tech aspects, particularly around security are subject to export restrictions.  Bear in mind that I’m not talking about exotic industrial or military standards here, but everyday consumer standards for products you’d use in the home.  In contrast, anyone can make and ship a cable.

But that Holy Grail of wireless connectivity is strong.  However difficult it may be compared with the simple cable it paints a wonderfully desirable future free of tangles, along with the promise of a new generation of product design where products are no longer islands, but can communicate with each other in that vision of the Internet of Things.

But it’s important to understand the compromises underlying wireless.  To paraphrase the psalm, “and now abide range, throughput, security, these three; but the greatest of these is security”.  Well developed, robust wireless standards are neccessary, because without them we can’t attempt to fulfil these requirements.  And if any one of these three fail, so will customer confidence.  In conclusion, I’m hoping for another year of growth in wireless.   But it’s as well to understand the shifting sands we stand on when we make that wish.

Neither are immediately obvious candidates, which is what makes this interesting.  But taking a deeper look their appointment could highlight some interesting changes in where Bluetooth is going.

For those who don’t know how they’re structured, most industry standards groups, (as opposed to Standards Development Organisations or SDOs, which we’ll get to in a minute), consist of a Board of Directors whose role it is to guide the development, marketing and certification of the standard.  In the early days, these were normally companies with a vested interest in using the standard.  As the standard matures, these companies tend to drift away, to be replaced with chip manufacturers who want to evolve the standard to keep competitors out of the market.  In most cases, these industry groups tend to get things done faster, as they limit who can take part in writing the standards, generally to companies with a vested interest who are prepared to pay for the privilege. 

In contrast SDOs tend to be more open, allowing academic institutions to participate.  That often means they’re favoured by governments, who fund academic institutions to get involved and don’t necessarily care when the work is completed.  It’s the old case of too many cooks.  So SIGs and their Boards have a lot going for them.

Bluetooth largely set the standard for how to constitute a SIG (if you’ll pardon the pun), with a founding set of five members - Toshiba, IBM, Ericsson, Nokia and Intel back in 1998.    “What, no Microsoft?”, I hear you say, as did most of the rest of the industry.  For eighteen months every US journalist rubbished Bluetooth for this omission, until in December of 1999 the board was extended to include Microsoft, along with Motorola and the dearly departed 3Com and Agere.  That didn’t stop the media claiming Bluetooth was dead.  However, like Mark Twain, reports of its death were somewhat exaggerated, as proven by fact it ships a couple of billion chips every year.

The Bluetooth SIG has hitherto carried out a rather Stalinist policy towards board membership, trying to insist that it never changes and that any company who is on the Board has always been on the Board.  And despite some attrition over the years, it has kept the board very much the same.  That contrasts with other similar organisations, which have been more ready to shuffles the directorial cards.  Even when conspiracy theorists suggested that Steve Jobs might join back in 2002, the Bluetooth Board kept a wary distance and declined to act.

Which makes the current announcement all the more interesting.  It’s been a difficult few years for standards organisations.  As the recession has taken hold, large organisations, who traditionally provide the board members for these standards organisations have tightened their belts and withdrew their support, leaving the daily work to their stack and chip suppliers.  The Bluetooth board has held remarkably firm against this trend, although it has a set of crown jewels in terms of its IP ownership, which other standards bodies can only look at envy.  Access to that has been an important factor behind the stability that the Bluetooth Board has experienced over the years.  But despite that, they’ve no opened the doors, albeit with an interesting disclaimer that the appointments are only for an initial period of two years.  The cynical might say that gives them just long enough to get disillusioned, but not long enough to effect any change.

Why the change?  Both appointments suggest an intent to push the new Bluetooth low energy standard.  Nordic Semiconductor were one of the pioneers of Bluetooth low energy back in the days when it was still called Wibree.  Getting a Board seat ahead of the more established chip vendors such as Broadcom, CSR, Qualcomm and TI is a real coup and as clear an indication as you can get that Bluetooth low energy is about to get the attention it deserves.

Apple is more interesting.  It’s almost ten years since those early rumours that it should be on the board, during which it’s been responsible for some excellent Bluetooth implementations (on the Macs) and some abysmal one on the iPhone, where it’s authentication chip has turned a standard into a proprietary walled garden.  Despite their superb product design and marketing, they’re a relative newcomer to the standards community, generally relying on external standards rather than sharing their expertise to create new, open ones.

Again, the clue for their appointment is in Bluetooth low energy and what it offers.  A key market for low energy has always been personal health and fitness devices.  The new MacBook Air and Mac mini appear to be planning to make full use of these, as reported in the latest releases on the Bluetooth website.  Let’s hope that these don’t try to cripple the standard with more proprietary extensions or authentication.  The market needs Bluetooth low energy to be open and interoperable.

The one remaining question is “why stop at two new members”?  There’s still the invisible gorilla in the short range space, which is Google.  Their announcements of Android@Home during their I/O conference suggested that they could be the ideal partner for Bluetooth low energy, as they could bring their API expertise to the top of the low energy stack.  Of course, they still can.  And it will be interesting to see whether Apple’s high level API for developers will emerge as an open standard for the Bluetooth low energy community?  Low energy developers need a single API, not a proliferation of them.

The other interesting question is what this means for other standards?  Whilst Bluetooth low energy has been slowly emerging from its cocoon, other pretenders have been making hay.  Notably ANT+, which has attracted a growing following in the health and fitness arena.  Most of these products use a Nordic chip (recently augmented by silicon from TI), but with Nordic on the Bluetooth board, and Apple hopefully providing the powerhouse for independent product developers, does this appointment close the door for ANT and start a steady attrition of their existing supporters?

The race is on and only time will tell.  This is a major step for the Bluetooth board to take and could have ramifications far greater than initially considered.  One that hasn’t been mentioned is where the SIG goes in terms of location.  The appointment of Microsoft to the Board back in 1999 signalled the start of an inexorable transition of the Bluetooth headquarters from Kansas City to Seattle.  I wonder whether the addition of Apple might provoke a similar relocation in a few years’ time to Cupertino?

Wherever the SIG may land, let’s hope that the road forward for Bluetooth low energy is now clear.  It’s difficult to think of a better starting pistol.  All we need now is to get enough runners on the track and make sure they’re all facing in the same direction.

Samsung have made it to number one in Europe: in the first quarter of this year, shipping 13.2 million units - 600,000 ahead of Nokia.  But for the last few years I’ve been tracking a slightly different metric - the combined sales of Samsung and LG, which I’ve called Korea Inc.  They’ve been closing the gap and in the latest figures from IDC we can see that they can now claim supremacy, pushing Nokia firmly into second place.

To be fair, it’s not been so much a case of Korea Inc. overtaking Nokia in this last quarter, but of Nokia shedding its sales, as it plummets from a market share of 33.8% to 24.2%.  It’s one of the bizarre aspects of the mobile phone market that most companies don’t get pushed, they don their lemming suits and head for the cliff.  At certain points in the last fifteen years Motorola, Ericsson (latterly Sony Ericsson), Philips and Siemens have all looked like contenders, but each has lost its way and lumbered back to the handset manufacturer’s graveyard, leaving Nokia standing alone as the untouchable leader.  Until this quarter Nokia has managed to maintain it’s unassailable position, but it now looks as if it has started on the slippery downwards slope.

What is interesting is that, with the exception of Samsung, the past two years have seen no real challenger to volume sales.  Samsung has grown steadily, but failed to put on a convincing sprint to gain pole position.  And Nokia and Samsung still remain in a class of their own.  Behind them, in number three position is LG, which had potential but has slowly been losing market share for most of the last two years.  And vying between themselves for fourth position are Apple and ZTE.

These two tell almost as interesting story as the battle for first place.  Few in the industry or high street would believe that they are more or less neck and neck in terms of volume.  ZTE have been around longer, so there are probably rather more ZTE handsets being used today than there are iPhones, which many would find difficult to believe.   Of course, they have very different demographics.  iPhones sell to industry analysts, journalists and those of us who write blogs, whereas ZTE handsets don’t. Which is one of the main reasons why the public perception of each, as well as the revenue per handset for these two companies are at opposite ends of the scale, despite the similarity in their volumes. 

ZTE have just announced that they intend to ship 80 million handsets this year and there’s little reason to suspect that they won’t achieve that, or at least something close.  If they manage that they’ll easily overtake Apple and have an outside chance of grabbing third place from LG.

Where will the market be in twelve months?  It won’t move rapidly.  Although companies fall from the ranks due to long term strategic miscalculations, they don’t stay in the top five just because of their handset design, but more importantly because of their skill in controlling their supply chain.  Volume and experience breed success, as every cent counts when you’re making tens of million of handsets a month.  As does the relationships you have with subcontractors, suppliers, distributors and networks and you brand. 

The time and effort it takes to get all of that right means that there is no obvious contender sitting there ready to take Nokia’s place.  Apple doesn’t have the breadth of handset range.  In fact, unless LG makes a major mistake Apple is probably consigned to slipping in and out of fifth place, but making a lot of money from being at the bottom of the leader table, selling to those with the highest disposable incomes.  It’s more likely that ZTE is the most credible challenger to both Samsung and Nokia, unless one of the other Chinese handsets decides to take on the world.  I’ve not sat in any of their strategy meetings, but I wonder which of them is quietly putting forward a vision to a room full of sceptical engineers that they will be the company toppling Samsung in 2016?

The greatest level of speculation has come from the smart energy industry, who are suggesting that ZigBee could be the main casualty.  Jesse Best at Smart Grid News asks whether this will take away ZigBee’s momentum.  And there’s an interesting range of comments about that on his site about that, which are worth reading.  Throughout the industry, Google’s announcement is making people question whether they’ve made the right choice?

I’m not sure that anything Google does will displace ZigBee from its place in smart meters.   That’s actually quite a closed market, as most utilities don’t really want to share that data with consumer devices.  Where it is a threat is in home automation.  Home Automation is still a very nascent market and Bluetooth, Wi-Fi and ZigBee are all pitching to own it.  The reason I think they are at risk is because of what Google can bring, which is an API (Application Programming Interface).  Google has succeeded in areas like mapping because it makes it easy for developers to access and mash up data.  In contrast, wireless standards shy away from making their stacks easy to use, particularly for embedded designs.  If Google can make it easy, thousands of garage and backroom developers will take it and innovate with it, and the existing standards may all find themselves left behind.

It’s worth pointing out that Google has some major challenges if it is going to achieve any level of success with a wireless stanard.  Robust wireless standards are not easy to write.  Bluetooth, Wi-Fi and ZigBee are all ten years old - it’s taken that long to get them right.  Wireless is difficult - it introduces issues of security, topology and connectivity that aren’t there is a cable.  For more on the problems of writing a wireless standard, read the book.

That made it odd to hear Eric Holland of Lighting Science Group expostulating about their shortcomings, citing interference, latency and difficulty in deployment.  He may know something the rest of us don’t, but it sounds like a glib marketing story.  According to reports the radio will “run in the 800 - 915MHz band”.  That is actually a lot more limited than it sounds, allowing a limited number of devices.  Plus it’s not a global band, so products designed for the US will be illegal in Europe and vice versa.  There are already other standards working in that range, so they may be building on one of those, but most of them are pretty basic and need a lot of work if they’re going to grow to support billions of devices.  Which takes a lot of time.  The low frequency has the advantage of having better range than 2.4GHz, which is good for home automation.  But it has a significant disadvantage which is that it requires yet another antenna for phone and tablet manufacturers to add to their devices, which may make it difficult to persuade them to adopt it. 

Then there’s the issue of regulations.  However clever you are, you can’t just design a new radio and sell it.  You need to get it approved in each country you sell it and meet some very strict legal requirements on how your radio operates.  There are ways around that; some manufacturers make certified modules, which can be used in products without the need for further certification, but it’s a process that is highly regulated and poorly understood by most home automation developers.

Plus there are IP issues.  Holland claims that this is a mesh network.  If it is, it’s probably infringing someone’s intellectual property - quite possibly that of the ZigBee Alliance members.  If it’s using security, then it’s probably infringing IP from within Bluetooth and Wi-Fi.  And if it’s not using security you don’t want to use it, or else your neighbour’s kids will start controlling your lights.  Moreover, the people who own much of this IP, such as Nokia, Ericsson and Qualcomm, have bigger and nastier lawyers than Google.

My guess is that this is an early demo, with a partner who has given a rather naïve press interview.  Nevertheless, the industry should not underestimate it.  As I said earlier, Google understands the value of APIs.  If it chooses a competent wireless standard and provides the right APIs it could quite easily capture the home automation market, killing it off for anyone else.  And possibly discard Lighting Science Group along the way as an expendable means to an end.  Alternatively Google could decide to sit an API on top of a number of different standards, and let the market decide on which one to use.  Although the user experience from that approach is not wonderful.

The alternative is for the competing wireless standards to make their standards easier to use, but I’m not confident about that.  I’ve sat in standards meetings when working group members have argued that it’s not there job to write APIs, because that’s not what a wireless standard is about.  It’s as if they’re afraid that someone might actually use their standard if they make it easy to use.

So it will be interesting to see what happens?  In a soundbite fixated world this announcement will increase the level of chatter which can only be negative for Bluetooth, Wi-Fi and ZigBee.  With the smallest market base of the triumvirate, ZigBee probably has most to lose.  If it gets its head down and concentrates on getting products out it should be fine (which should be a wake up call to those in the current SEP2.0 debate).  But it’s a diversion that ZigBee could do without.  On the other hand, if the industry delays its smart meter roll-out, all bets could be off.

Bluetooth may not fare any better.  It’s finally getting to the point where Bluetooth low energy may see the light of day after a tortuous journey.  I’d suggest that the Bluetooth SIG should be offering that standard to Google on bended knee, as Bluetooth low energy desperately needs some momentum to get it going.  So Google may be the best bet for Bluetooth low energy, if the Bluetooth potentates can bring themselves to descend from their Ivory Tower in Seattle.  There is alreadysome confusion about what the underlying wireless offering is in Android@Home.  Alongside Holland’s assertion that it will be a mesh in the 800 - 915MHz range, other commentators have reported that Google’s plans do include Bluetooth, so maybe that journey from Seattle’s Olympian peaks is already taking place.

Meanwhile, Wi-Fi may find its aspirations outside wireless internet and video streaming dispatched to an early grave.  Which is worrying for those companies trying to carve out a niche for low power Wi-Fi applications.

There’s an interesting new partnership opportunity which could threaten them all, which is for Google to pair up with low power DECT.  That’s having something of a resurgence and offers a radio and protocol that would make a rather good match.  But it’s probably a little too bizarre a partnership to contemplate.

So, its time to put down you bets on Home Automation.  It will probably be a long and dirty path.  And unless you plan to replace any purchases within the next three years, it might be a good idea to put off buying anything until then.  Just remember how much good getting up and walking to the light switch is doing you.  If we’re lucky, or maybe it should be unlucky, we may be the last generation to do that, so that it’s a journey our children will never take…

The marketing world has always understood that if you want to catch a consumer, catch them young.  Tom Lehrer parodied it well with his song “The Old Dope Peddler” who “gave the kids free samples, because he knew full well, that today’s young innocent faces, will be tomorrow’s clientele”.  The consumer electronics industry is equally aware of that principle, as I was reminded today when I went past a window exhorting parents to start their children off on a life of electronic materialism with “My First Sony”.

Nokia must wish that they could be that confident.  When I upgraded my phone to a Nokia E72 this year I thought harder about that decision than I had for most of my previous upgrades.  What finally won me over and stopped me jumping to Android were two features - Ovi Maps and a battery life of four or more days.  But I bought it with the realisation that my next phone would probably not be Finnish.  With the announcement of the new relationship between Nokia and Microsoft, I wonder whether their marketing departments need to get together and make a final push for short term market share with the slogan “My Last Nokia”? 

It’s one of those questions that could enter the public consciousness, like “do you remember where you where when Kennedy was assassinated”, or “when Neil Armstrong took his first step on the moon”?  For today’s generation of phone users, they may look back and wonder “where was it that they bought their last Nokia”.

Back in 1996 I was part of a small start-up company that was developing a GSM data stack for Samsung.  This was before they’d made their first GSM phone.  The phone design team in Staines, where the development was taking place, had a visit from a Korean manager and I was invited down to attend a presentation outlining the corporate vision.  In it, we were told that Samsung’s goal was to become the number one global phone supplier by 2001.  This was audacious - they were still barely at the stage of getting a prototype working.  Back then Nokia were firmly number one, followed by Ericsson, Motorola, Siemens and Philips.  I remember looking around and seeing the European developers trying to suppress grins, thinking that the translator must have made a mistake.  Since 2001, those grins have seemed misplaced.  Back in 1996 Samsung were unknown in the GSM world.  For the last five years they have been the only credible challenger to Nokia, and probably the only company to scare them.

Nokia must be applauded for keeping their key position.  Over the fifteen years since Samsung decided to make that challenge the competition has changed.  Ericsson went into meltdown, merged with Sony and the schizophrenic union still seems unclear about its identity.  Philips disappeared, as did Siemens.  Motorola did its best to commit suicide, but recovered when it launched the RaZR, before faltering again and finding a third life when it discovered Android.  (There is an apocryphal story within the industry that the RaZR was designed by an independent company who first tried to sell it to Nokia.  The story goes that they turned it down, largely because of their dislike for the clamshell form factor, but Motorola’s late Geoffrey Frost, who was offered it next, recognised its potential and snapped it up.  Allegedly the Nokia executive who turned it down still has a job in Nokia, but it is unconfirmed whether they were involved in the recent Microsoft phone link-up. If anyone has any evidence to confirm this story, please let me know - it’s a rumour that deserves to be true.) 

RIM made a successful play to woo the business market and create a more popular smartphone niche.  More recently Apple came along, made a lot of noise, and changed the way the world saw Smartphones, despite the fact that it sold to a relatively small but fanatical style-obsessed demographic.  And the most recent entrant to upset the applecart has been Android.  Unlike every major player other than Microsoft, Google’s not a hardware manufacturer, despite a short foray in that direction.  But unlike its rival non-hardware player, it achieved something that Microsoft had constantly failed at - making a handset operating system attractive. Cynics will point out that it’s always easier when you give it away for free, but there was something in Google’s offering which caught the zeitgeist.

But despite the constant flux beneath the surface, Nokia has weathered every storm, continuing to dominate the market.  However much commentators and analysts have tried to disparage their continuing market share and lacklustre performance in the very smartphone sector they created, the fact cannot be denied that Nokia continue to ship more phones than its two closest rivals put together.  And you can’t argue with that sort of performance.

Except that it may not last.  Over the past year I’ve been comparing Nokia’s market share with what I call “Korea Inc.” - the combination of Samsung and LG.  As the graph below indicates, they’ve been narrowing the gap.  In the last quarter of 2010 Nokia had its usual Christmas spike.  If that relaxes back and Korea Inc. keep on growing I think they may overtake Nokia this quarter.  And that’s before the effect of the Microsoft announcement.

The Microsoft alliance provides some good reasons as to why Nokia’s share may fall even faster in the short term.   Today their smartphone offering is Symbian based.  They’re still trying hard to sell those handsets to the network operators, but that may be difficult.  Most operators have pushed their smartphone customers towards eighteen and twenty-four month contracts.  And the mindset of those operators is currently Apps, Apps and more Apps.  Every Symbian phone they sell is effectively an Apps cul-de-sac.  If they take more Symbian handsets, it’s with the knowledge that the customer may get so fed up with it, they’ll probably jump to another network before the end of the contract.  Or else they’ll have to upgrade them early to keep them on board, which is expensive.  Neither of which is good news for Nokia when the alternative for the operator is to sell them an Android or an iPhone.

That’s not to say that the networks don’t support a Nokia / Microsoft tie-up.  There’s plenty of evidence that Nokia looked seriously at Android as an alternative - it’s just that when they did the numbers, the Microsoft deal made more financial sense.  Many of the networks will have breathed a sigh of relief at this, because Google scares them.  Google probably has a better ability to trash voice revenue than anyone else, plus it’s a force that’s largely outside the control of the traditional network / handset hierarchy.  Apple scares them as well, but at Mobile World Congress the more cynical networks were already dreaming of a post-Steve decline in Apple’s fortunes.  They’re hoping that after the matt black memorial iPhone5 edition, Apple will lose its shine and fade away as Siemens and Philips did a decade ago.

But the effects of the new alliance will run deeper.  Inside handsets, there’s been a fierce battle for dominance amongst semiconductor companies.  Whilst Qualcomm has won design wins from many handset vendors, companies like TI have long been favoured within Nokia.  That may change, as Qualcomm chipsets are the preferred solutions to run the Windows platform.  In the past Nokia has achieved a lot of its excellence in hardware performance by being largely in control of what goes onto the chips.   If it moves to a Qualcomm platform it may lose that close relationship and design input.  Which means a new Nokia may not have the hardware edge it used to have.

The other effect it will have on the industry is on standards.  Nokia has supported many standards efforts by supplying experts to the working groups.  They had immense influence in creating the Bluetooth specification and contributed Wibree to the Bluetooth community.  They’ve been equally active in each iteration of the GSM standards.  As Nokia is disbanding their software teams, those experts and their funding are melting away.  Newer pretenders like Google and Apple are barely noticeable in the standards world.  It’s the start of a cold wind which will slow down standards development, as well as the qualification and testing work that leads to standards interoperability.  And it may make Nokia more inclined to use its IP as a commercial challenge, rather than contributing it to open standards.

Nokia and Microsoft as a combination may work, and it would be good if it does.  But it has the potential to crash in flames.  And if Nokia falls, the mobile ecosystem may need to reinvent itself.  As indeed may Finland.  Without Nokia’s tax receipts, by 2020, Finland might find it’s become East Sweden or Northern Estonia.  Which is something that should be far more worrying than the brand name on my next handset.

What has been missing is any reaction, or in fact much sign of any action from their elder siblings - Bluetooth and Wi-Fi.  As large manufacturers continue to tighten their belts, one of the less noticed effects has been a steady withdrawal of engineering support from standards organisations.  In the past, many of these have been staffed with seconded experts from the big names in industry.  Increasingly those big names are withdrawing, relying largely on chip vendors to push their interests within the standards organisations.  That’s left Wi-Fi and Bluetooth battling to persuade industry members that either standard has a development future, with certain of their members considering that the job has been done.

Which opens up the field for the former competitors to claim some potentially interesting parts of the market.

ZigBee has been around for almost seven years, but has struggled to gain traction.  Part of its problem is that unlike Bluetooth and Wi-Fi, it hasn’t got a free ride from being incorporated into phones or PCs.  That’s meant it’s had to fight for every chip that its members have sold.  During those seven years it’s tried its arm in a number of different application areas before selling its soul to the smart metering movement (and to a lesser degree, home automation).  That Faustian pact looks as if it may be about to pay off.

Last week the ZigBee Alliance made the provocative move of holding its quarterly meeting in Seattle, home of the Bluetooth SIG.  In the event, it’s not obvious that they even disturbed the sleep of their neighbourly slumbering giant.  The meeting’s main purpose was to finalise and approve the latest Version 1.1 of the ZigBee Smart Energy Profile (SEP 1.1).  That happened, so the world now has SEP 1.1.  In addition, the meeting managed to do a host of useful work on moving towards the next version - SEP 2.0, and making progress on the Home Automation Profiles.

SEP 1.1 is an extremely important step for ZigBee, as it signifies a bridge between today’s form of ZigBee mesh and the future form, which is IP based, drawing on the work of the 6LoWPAN initiative.  Every certified ZigBee produce that exists in the market today uses ZigBee’s own mesh protocol.  That has been refined through a number of releases to be a robust mesh network.  However, it does not allow every node to be addressed from an IP network.  That requires a fundamentally new layer to be added, which is the core of SEP 2.0.  In the US, NIST has mandated IP addressability for future smart grid standards, and elsewhere in the world, many other governments and regulators are thinking whether they should follow that lead.

The problem is that the two protocols of pre- and post-IP ZigBee are not compatible.  For utilities that are currently starting smart meter deployments that’s a big concern, as if they standardise on meters with ZigBee SEP 1.0 today, they risk having millions of stranded assets that may be incompatible with their future infrastructure.  That’s where SEP 1.1 comes in, and why it’s so important.  The main addition that it contains is a standardised upload method, which will allow devices in the field to be upgraded over the air to a future ZigBee 2.0 standard.  That should give the smart metering industry the confidence to move ahead with deployments, with a much lower risk of stranded meters.  There are still some questions to be asked, not least of which is whether an SEP 1.1 device will have sufficient memory and computing resource to run a future 2.0 Smart Energy Profile?  And we won’t necessarily know the answer to that for another six months, when work on that profile will be drawing to a close.  But with that caveat, SEP 1.1 should be lifting a considerable weight from the minds of utilities contemplating a smart meter project.

ANT weren’t meeting this week, but released an “independent” analysis of the power consumption of different wireless standards, blasting ZigBee as “cumbersome, high power and fragmented“.   ANT has come from being a small scale, proprietary standard for sorts and fitness devices, to being a serious contender that is also beginning to make inroads in medical devices.

In some senses, ANT is still proprietary, as it’s owned and managed by Dynastream, a company in turn owned by Garmin.  They’ve resisted opening the standard up as a wider industry effort, as they claim that this would result in unnecessary committees, doubtless agreeing with the old adage that a committee is “something that takes minutes and wastes hours”.  Ironically that’s not dissimilar to the attitude of Bluetooth’s five founding members, who felt that they could do a more expedient job of getting a standard to market by keeping the work to themselves.  What goes around, goes around…

What has moved ANT out of the proprietary regime is a growing number of silicon vendors who are supporting, or looking to support it.  As well as the original devices from Nordic Semiconductor, you can now find ANT support in TI chips, including those that go into mobile phones.  ANT has been doing a very good job of allowing manufacturers to tell it what profiles they want and then implementing them, with the result that a growing number of health and fitness devices are sporting ANT.

In contrast, the ability of Bluetooth, Wi-Fi and ZigBee to get into health devices has been at best lacklustre.  Despite the Continua Health Alliance selecting both Bluetooth and ZigBee as its preferred wireless standards, ANT is the standard that’s making the running in the marketplace.

The newcomer, or the toddler showing promise is Toumaz - a UK start-up, which has been active for some years in low power, sub GHz Body Area Wireless Networks, notably with its Sensium platform.  Their latest chip - the TZ1053 “Telran” (and I have no idea what that means - the only reference I can find to Telran is an Israeli company selling set top boxes and food mixers), shows that they’re keen to move past their medical market and try to take a bite out of wireless sensor networks, environmental monitoring and smart metering.

Toumaz differs in that it’s not running at 2.4GHz, and offers higher range and lower power, such that it will run off a coin cell for years.  If you think you’ve heard that before, you’d be right - it’s what Bluetooth chip companies have been claiming for Bluetooth low energy.  I’ve certainly seen demonstrations that prove that they can achieve these figures.  But with no clear indication of when profiles will arrive for Bluetooth low energy, and with Nokia - the key driver of the technology, (dating back from when it was WiBree) having rather more important issues to deal with, the question arises as to whether the Bluetooth SIG is fiddling whilst Rome burns?

A few years ago the short range wireless hegemony looked fairly well established.  Wi-Fi would do internet access to static laptops, Bluetooth would do voice and anything connected to a phone, ZigBee would probably do smart energy, and anything else was up for grabs.  Bluetooth low energy and Wi-Fi then came along and threatened to change the status quo, but most of that early enthusiasm seems to have disappeared as the desire to grow and own new ecosystems has waned.  ZigBee now looks as if it will repel any boarders on the smart energy front, and ANT may well be the eventual winner for healthcare.  There’s still a healthy business for low cost proprietary wireless in everything from keyboards to toys to burglar alarms, and it looks as if that might stay around for a lot longer than anyone thought.

The only question now is whether any of the standards will fail?  Most of them have the ability to replace some of the other applications, but don’t necessarily appear to have the stomach for a battle.  Instead they may play a waiting game, hoping that something upsets one of the markets, giving them a chance to come in and pick up the pieces.   The one thing that has changed for all of them is the level of industry participation.  To move forward, they’re having to do more with fewer resources.  It may well be that is the key factor that maintains the status quo we seem to have arrived at.  If so, it will be interesting to see whether new or derivative standards are successful, or whether the future is limited to muddling along with the current incumbents?

It’s obvious that the industry has moved from PowerPoint presentations to reality.  Chips were on display, along with development boards and the first few modules.  In the Forum within Electronica there were sessions on the applications it will enable, and in the adjoining Wireless Congress a full day’s track was devoted to developer training and further applications.

The silicon and tools are definitely here.  Now it’s time for developers to add their imagination.

Starting with the silicon, the most prominent demonstration was that from EM Microelectronics.  EM are a division of Swatch and specialise in ultra low power micros and wireless chips.  Theirs was probably the largest stand of any company involved in Bluetooth low energy, and strategically positioned on the main corridor through the “A” halls.  Pride of place at the front of the stand was given over to a live demonstration of their Bluetooth low energy chips sending data from low power temperature and humidity sensors.  It may not sound the most exciting demo in the world, but enabling wireless sensors is what Bluetooth low energy is all about.  Especially when you need them to run for years off a single coin cell.

Their transceiver chip - the EM9301 operates at voltage as low as 0.8V, with sub microAmp standby current.  Those are levels that make it useable for applications which are powered by energy harvesting devices. EM was also exhibiting a module based around that chip - the EM9301SA.  It’s around 15mm x 15mm, including a printed antenna.  They were also showing their development kit.

Nordic Semiconductor is another proprietary wireless company that has brought its expertise into the Bluetooth low energy community.  They were claiming that their solution, incorporating the nRF8001, will be fully qualified including the Generic Attribute Profile (GATT) and Generic Access Profile (GAP) in December.  They’re promoting this as a single chip solution which includes a micro for embedded applications.  They also have a low energy development kit, and have teamed up with Insight - the French module vendor, to produce a miniature module that is a mere 8mm x 12mm x 1.4mm.

CSR had examples of their CSR1000 and CSR1001 single mode chips, as well as their dual mode chip.  Their display included a development kit and a number of prototype boards demonstrating different applications.

TI were showing off their CC2540 SoC, designed for low energy devices.  The chip contains a complete Bluetooth low energy controller and host stack, with an 8051 and 128/256kB on chip flash, which can be used to develop embedded applications.  Like the other vendors, they have a development kit available to get designers started.  They also have a dual mode solution available in their Wi-Link combo chips.

A number of other silicon vendors told me that they have chips in development, which will be announced in 2011, so it looks as if we’ll have over a dozen chips to choose from by this time next year.

For small volume designs, and for companies that was to innovate or achieve fast time to market, modules are going to be an important way to get into Bluetooth low energy.  Whilst most of the module vendors are claiming to have low energy on their roadmap, two of them - BlueGiga and Panasonic were actively promoting their first products.

Panasonic’s PAN1720 module is based on the TI 2541 chip.  They’re already sampling key customers and claim that it will be widely available at the start of next year.  It’s 15.6mm x 8.7mm x 1.8mm, contains a ceramic antenna and initially supports battery and proximity profiles.

BlueGiga also have a TI based module.  They’ve taken an interesting approach of writing the full stack for themselves. (Most module vendors rely on a stack from the silicon provider.)  At the top end of the stack, they’ve defined an XML schema for profiles, which allows a developer to choose which profiles or characteristics they want to use, then compile that into an image which can be dropped into the module.  I look forward to playing with that - it sounds a very effective way of developing low energy applications.

The Bluetooth SIG was present to promote their ongoing “Innovation World Cup” championship.  This is a competition for designers to submit their best ideas for products that utilise Bluetooth low energy.  Nine of the finalists were on display in their booth, and were represented in a well attended afternoon of application discussions in the Electronica forum.  The range of finalists is wonderfully diverse, ranging from a cycle computer, through health applications to a barbecue grill thermometer.

Alongside the main exhibition, the annual Wireless Congress devoted a day to Bluetooth low energy.  Robin Heydon and I spent a morning running a technical training session on how to use Bluetooth low energy, before the delegates moved to a keynote on Bluetooth from Anders Edlund of the Bluetooth SIG, and an afternoon of talks on specific application areas, ranging from smart energy to automotive.

There was no doubt that the interest level in Bluetooth low energy has started to take off, as it moves firmly from speculation to reality.  The number of chips available, the advent of dev kits and modules, an enthusiastic audience for presentations and even two slots on the Electronica TV channel signal the fact that the technology is here.  By the time of the next Electronica in November 2012, analysts expect that over 100 million chips will have shipped.  If you want to be part of that growth, now is definitely the time to get involved and find out more.

To keep up to date with Bluetooth low energy, join the LinkedIn Bluetooth low energy group.

In the early days of remotes, the dominant technology was ultrasonic, but they’ve evolved to the point today that almost all use infra red (IR) transmitters.  IR is cheap and directional; the latter feature being useful in a world where there is limited interoperability and interference can be mitigated by pointing the remote control in the right direction.  However, it’s a one way connection, as keeping a photo diode alive to look for a signal coming back from the TV would decimate the battery life.

As the audio-video equipment we buy has become more sophisticated, manufacturers have been looking for an alternative technology that would allow low power, two-way communication between equipment and remote.  The obvious solution is wireless, but the question is which one?  A few years ago chip vendors who were looking for customers for their 802.15.4 radio ICs, decided to put together a standard to try and sell a few more of their chips.  (802.15.4 is underlying radio standard used by ZigBee and other specialist wireless stacks, none of which are shipping in the volumes required to make chip manufacture very profitable.)  That standard became known as RF4CE (Radio Frequency for Consumer Electronics) and was eventually embraced by the ZigBee Alliance.  The Japanese AV industry bought the story and have recently begun shipping RF4CE handsets into their local market.  As the volumes have ramped up, rumours are growing that an increasing number are being returned because they don’t work.  It’s too early to be sure what the reason is, but when you delve into the detail of the RF4CE standard it looks a bit flaky.  That could herald a golden opportunity for Bluetooth low energy, which is charging onto the remote control scene like a wireless knight in shining armour.

The RF4CE specification was released by the ZigBee Alliance in March 2009.  Although it carries the ZigBee name, it’s not a mesh network, nor is it interoperable with the better known ZigBee 2007 or ZigBee PRO standards.  Instead it uses a much simplified network layer (NWK), which is designed for less critical applications where the two prime requirements are battery life and low latency.  Low latency means that when you press a button, the effect at the other end, typically the TV, is essentially instantaneous.  Users won’t accept a wireless standard where there’s a significant delay between pushing a button to change channel or mute the sound and seeing having it take effect.

RF4CE operates in the same 2.4GHz spectrum that is used by ZigBee, Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, microwave ovens, baby alarms and proprietary wireless solutions, which gives it a problem that every other radio operating in this band has: it needs to cope with interference from other devices.

The method chosen by the RF4CE standard is to use the concept of frequency agility.  Frequency agility allows a network coordinator to set up a network on the assumption that it will always work on one fixed frequency, but, if it discovers that it is experiencing interference, then the whole network moves to a different, fixed frequency.  The hope is that the system will eventually find a frequency where it can operate without interference.

To work, the people writing the standard need to determine which frequencies the system should operate on and which one the network coordinator should choose when the system first starts.  That means you need to look at what else is likely to be transmitting in the band.  It’s difficult to predict where microwave ovens, baby alarms and the like will transmit, as manufacturers are free to let these transmit anywhere they want within the frequency band.   Rather counter-intuitively, Bluetooth is not normally a problem, as it is a frequency hopping system, changing the frequency it transmits on many times a second.  So if it interferes with, or experiences interference, it will move to a different frequency before it retries its connection.  The big invisible elephant occupying the 2.4GHz spectrum is Wi-Fi.  Wi-Fi access points operate at a fixed frequency like ZigBee and RF4CE, which is generally set for the life of the access point when it is initially set up.  It’s a big spectral elephant, with a bandwidth of 22MHz, compared to the slim-line 2MHz of an 802.15.4 channel, or 1MHz of Bluetooth.  Which means it can block a large chunk of the spectrum.

Wi-Fi operates on eleven overlapping channels.  Because these channels are so wide, there are three non-overlapping channels which access points are normally set to operate on.  These are spaced apart so they don’t interfere with each other.  These are known as channels 1, 6 and 11.  In order to make it simple to design, RF4CE only operates at three different channels, which are ZigBee Channels 15, 20 and 25.  (To confuse everyone, these numbers have absolutely nothing to do with the channel numbers of Wi-Fi.  You don’t need to know why they are numbered that way, but if you do, buy the book.)  What you do need to know is that these are neatly chosen to fit into the gaps between the common Wi-Fi channels to minimise the chance of interference.

That’s nice in theory, but the real world has a nasty habit of kicking theory in the teeth.  To see what that means, we need to see what the frequency channels look like in real life.  If you have Wi-Fi on your mobile phone or laptop, there are some neat pieces of software that you can use to display the local Wi-Fi networks.  Have a look at the excellent WiFi Analyzer for Android, or the more complex Netsurveyor for a PC.  These show you that the real world is not like the diagram above - there’s a lot more happening in the spectrum.  If you don’t have one of these, read a piece of research done by Washington University in St Louis.  They mapped the spectrum usage in student accommodation on each of the 2MHz wide ZigBee channels over the course of a 24 hour day.  What they found is shown below:

The graphs indicate what the throughput is for a ZigBee transmitter set to continuously send data on each channel.  What it shows is that on every one of the ZigBee Channels in the 2.4GHz spectrum (channels 11 to 26), there are periods within the day when the throughput falls to zero.  In other words, there are large chunks of time when an RF4CE transmission would not be able to get through.  The research did not determine what caused this, but pointed out that a radio system that works on a fixed channel will experience periods where its transmissions will be blocked.

If you think about it, there’s quite a lot in common between student housing in St Louis and flats in Japan.  In both cases rooms tend to be small and located close together, and both sets of occupants have a passion for new technology.  So it’s not unexpected that RF4CE remote controls shipped to Japanese consumers might experience interference.  As we mentioned above, RF4CE has a system to attempt to cope with interference, which is called frequency agility.  When a node detects that a channel is not working, it sets in train a process to move every connected device to one of the other two available channels.  The expectation is that this will be a rare event, and as a result, it’s not designed to be a quick change, but can take several seconds.  When that happens once a month, a user can live with it.  When it happens multiple times a day, it renders a remote control useless.

That’s not good, but matters get even worse for RF4CE in Japan.  As we saw above, the three frequencies that RF4CE operates on have been chosen to avoid the Wi-Fi channels 1, 6 and 11.  When I said that these avoided the common WI-FI channels I wasn’t being totally honest.  They do in the US, but they don’t anywhere else.  I’m assuming that these channels were specified by engineers in the US.  The reason I’m assuming that is that in Europe and Japan the available 2.4GHz spectrum is wider, extending up to channel 13, or in some countries, channel 14.

This means that the top channel for RF4CE falls bang in the middle of the Wi-Fi channel which is often set as the default for access points in Europe and the Far East.  That effectively reduces RF4CE to operating over two fixed channels, and one of these partially overlaps Wi-Fi channel 7, which is also used outside the US.  So it only has one channel which might be clear, and that’s not guaranteed.  It means that RF4CE has nowhere to escape to, making it look like a standard which has been designed to fail.

And that appears to be what’s happening in Japan.  As a result, manufacturers are looking to migrate to Bluetooth low energy for their next generation of remote controls.  Bluetooth low energy employs adaptive frequency hopping, working at 37 different frequencies across the same 2.4GHz band.  It’s a scheme which makes it very robust to interference, so that even in a noisy spectrum it has an excellent chance of working.  Moreover its adaptive capability lets it dynamically exclude parts of the spectrum where it detects interference, allowing it to have the best chance of low latency throughout the course of the day.  As well as being robust to interference, Bluetooth low energy offers other advantages.  Not least of which is that because it is being built into mobile phones, users can use those to control devices.  The first prototypes are currently being tested by AV equipment vendors.  If all goes well, your next TV, DVD player or Set Top Box is likely to be controlled by Bluetooth.

UWB has had a chequered history of ups and downs.  Last year, when I started writing my book “Essentials of Short Range Wireless”, I planned a chapter on it as it seemed to be experiencing something of a renaissance.  Half way through writing the book, a number of the key chip companies folded and I removed the chapter.  It looks as if I may have acted prematurely.

Why the resurgence of interest?  UWB has had a turbulent history, with many of the start-up companies supporting it going bust as the industry embarked on its love affair with ever faster variants of Wi-Fi.  The answer comes back to the classic divide between the PC and mobile phone industries and the feature that separates them more than anything else: one has a power cord and the other doesn’t. 

That may sound like a glib comment, but it exercises many of the best design minds within each industry.  Ask most phone users what they want most in a phone and it’s one feature - the battery life, which manifests itself as talk time.  Most smartphone users have wistful, fond memories of a simpler phone (typically a Nokia 3310) which had a battery that only needed charging one per week.  Phone manufacturers and resellers will tell you that poor battery performance is still the one thing that is most likely to cause a customer to return a handset.

In contrast, poor battery life has long been seen as something a laptop user needs to live with.  The industry’s approach is generally that bas long as the next laptop has more memory, a bigger display, faster Wi-Fi and a recordable Blu-Ray drive, who cares?  They’ll argue that it comes with a power cord, and spends most of its working life attached to it.

Both products suffer from the same technological rat race, with competitors vying to add new features.  But the fundamental difference is that phone owners expect their phone to work for at least a day without being charged, whereas very few laptop owners would dare take their laptop out of the house in the morning without a power adaptor.

That’s why UWB is interesting, particularly for the mobile phone.  When GSM phones first came out the few models that could support a data connection had a maximum speed of 2.4kbps, which was all the networks were capable of.  Today networks can provide over 1Mbps and phones can store and transfer GBytes of data.  The problem is that it takes energy to transfer data wirelessly.  As the volume of data increases, the amount of energy needed to transfer a few GBytes exceeds the capacity of a normal phone battery.  So if we’re planning to stream video from a phone, the industry needs to develop a technology that can do it efficiently.

The requirement to stream video has upped the stakes, requiring a throughput of 35Mbps or more.  That’s beyond the capability of 802.11g, which is why the industry is moving to 802.11n.  802.11n achieves its higher throughput by splitting the signal into multiple streams, using multiple antennas, transmitters and receivers.  To work well, antennas need to be separated by several centimetres, which is fine for a PC, but a major problem for a mobile phone.  That limits mobiles phone that use 802.11n to using a single stream; a configuration known as 1×1.  With a single stream, at the most complex QAM64 coding, 802.11n can still deliver a theoretical maximum throughput of 65Mbps, and a practical one of around 40Mbps, but at a cost.  The power needed to support this rate using 802.11n is high.  Sufficiently high that it can reduce the battery life of a phone to less than half and ruin the talk time.  Moreover, with only one channel, the connection becomes directional.  As you move around with the phone, the throughput will drop significantly.  If you’re using your phone to give a business presentation, streaming to a projector, that turns 802.11n from a compelling solution to a disaster.

To address this, standards designers need to look at the efficiency of wireless data transfer.  In the race for higher speed, that’s generally been a point of largely academic interest.  As a very rough rule, as the throughput of a standard goes up, the energy per bit needed to send data over the air goes down as more information is packed into each bit.  However, this improvement tails off as the underlying protocol starts to become the dominant factor, limiting performance.  Also, as data coding get more complex, the transmitter and receivers needs to work harder, reducing any power savings.  Which means that at some point you generally need to develop a new standard if you want to get to the next level of performance.

That’s where UWB comes in.  By being designed for very high throughputs as a starting point, it doesn’t have the baggage of a low speed heritage that bedevils the 802.11 specifications.  At throughputs of around 30Mbps, data sheets show that typical 802.11n transmitters consume around 350mW, whereas UWB transmitters are less than a tenth of that.  Moreover, UWB was designed for streaming using an isochronous MAC, whereas 802.11n has to live with the inconvenience of a contention based access, which wastes more power.  For a phone, that means video streaming changes from a poor possibility to a real application.  Which is what I suspect is driving the Samsung and CSR announcements, as both have a strong interest and history in supporting innovation in mobile phones. 

Both companies’ chips appear to be aimed at the mobile market, either for phones, or for battery powered, handheld devices.  Samsung’s solution is a complete two ship set - the S3C2680 and S5M8311, which provides a complete wireless USB compliant solution, small enough to be implemented in an SD card and targeted at portable devices.

There’s less information on CSR’s solution, which was “outed” in Incisor - the wireless industry’s main newsletter.  They’d picked up the information from the Bluetooth SIG’s qualification site.  This puts information about all Bluetooth products and components in the public domain and revealed that CSR has qualified a version of their Synergy stack, which supports the Bluetooth 3.0+HS High Speed standard, but which uses a new Ultracore UWB chip that is WiMedia certified, operating in the 6-9GHz band.  There’s a brief technical document describing it that can be downloaded from the Bluetoooth SIG site.

The presence of these won’t stop the Wi-Fi bandwagon trying to get 802.11n into handsets.  Atheros, along with two more specialist chip companies - Redpine Signals and Nanoradio, are working hard to optimise their 802.11n 1×1 solutions to bring the power consumption down.  However, physics dictates that they’re not going to get to the levels that are possible with UWB.

And the PC industry is already looking to move on to 60GHz, with a new standard emerging from the Wireless Gigabit Alliance (WiGiG).  This follow the same PC route of assuming a power cord and a mains socket, transmitting at powers that would make your phone battery weep, so isn’t really competition for mobile devices.

Will UWB make a comeback?  It’s still too soon to tell.  It will be the best part of a year before we see either of these chips in a commercially available phone, but I’d expect to see some interesting demos before that, maybe at CES or MWC.  If these capture the imagination of user, then it may really be a case that UWB could eventually be the preferred wireless standard for high speed data on the mobile handset.

Presence is much more than just knowing where you are - it’s about communicating your presence with friends, the things around you and the web.  It also provides the ability to use that knowledge to determine how your personal devices and applications work.  Presence moves us from the paradigm of the traditional “You are here” sign, which applies to everyone in the area, to the far more personal concept of “I am here”.  It’s the next step in social networking and interacting with the web.  We’re already seeing the beginning of it with applications like Foursquare, Gowalla and Loopt, but they’re only the start, as new technologies will make it even easier to gain an awareness of and invoke conversation with our surroundings.

 Let’s take a simple example - how your mobile phone works.  Regardless of where you are in your daily life, your phone behaves in the same way, unless you specifically make the effort to change it.  So it rings with the same tone, for the same amount of time and at the same volume whether you’re at home, walking in the park, on the train or in the office.  You might have a sat nav application on it, but none of that knowledge about where you are is passed down to the everyday functionality of the phone, because that application sits a long way from the fundamental operation of the phone.  Your phone is your phone, is your phone. 

Presence allows your phone to pick up local information, typically from a short range transmitter that tells it where it is.  When it detects you’re at home it may ring at a different volume from when you’re not.  That may be different again when you’re in the office.  If you’re using apps on it, then you can configure which ones are displayed most prominently based on where you are.  So when your phone detects you’re in the office, you can choose to have work related ones (or work avoidance ones) prominent, whereas when you’re in the mall, it’s your shopping  list or comparison app that is most prominent.  In other words, when you personalise your phone settings you can make them take account of where you are - that’s a key part of presence.

There have been some attempts at implementing presence in the past, using both Bluetooth and Wi-Fi.  Where these are installed within products in static locations, such as access points, a mobile device can detect them, remember their unique wireless address and then use this to feed into an application.  However it’s always been a clunky approach, as neither of these standards are designed to provide information about where you are, rather than relying on you to correlate hexadecimal addresses with particular places.

The reason that this is about to change is the advent of Bluetooth low energy.  That’s a new wireless standard that will start appearing in Bluetooth enabled devices next year.  As the name implies, it’s designed to be very low power, but it has some other very important features, one of which is enabling the widescale deployment of presence transmitters. 

It’s one of the key applications that Bluetooth low energy has been designed for.  Presence requires that a static device broadcasts information about itself on a regular basis, typically saying where it is or what it is.  For that to work, the devices that receive these messages must be able to do so without consuming large amounts of power, or they won’t be able to run off batteries.  To achieve this and keep overall power consumption low is surprisingly difficult, but it’s something that the designers of Bluetooth low energy have managed to achieve.

There have been a few commercial deployments of Bluetooth advertising systems, which send messages to Bluetooth phones that are within range of them.  However, these are generally large, complex devices that normally need a broadband link and a mains supply.  That’s why there aren’t very many of them around.  In contrast Bluetooth low energy allows presence transmitters to be made that are small and can run off a single battery for years.  To understand how radical that change is, look at the picture below:

It’s a CR2032 coin cell with a couple of dimes stacked on top of it.  The two dimes represent the size of circuitry that is needed to implement a Bluetooth low energy transmitter which is capable of sending out a set of these presence broadcasts every few seconds, covering a range of 50 metres or more.  The CR2032 cell can power it for around three years.  Each one of these tiny presence transmitter motes can be pre-programmed, or set up when the battery is first inserted.  They don’t need a broadband connection.  They don’t need a power supply.  All they need for deployment is a double sided adhesive pad, or just being placed in a non-metallic piece of shop-fitting.  When manufactured in high volume they should cost no more than a dollar.

From the user perspective, applications on a phone can take advantage of the information these presence motes send and change the way the phone behaves as a result.  The presence broadcasts can be filtered, so that your phone only changes behaviour or acts on the transmitted information when you want.  So specific information can be fed through to complementary applications.

Bluetooth low energy brings a couple of big advantages to presence.  Today the only way to acquire location with any degree of accuracy is via GPS.  That has the shortcoming that it only works outside.  It has a second shortcoming which is rather more subtle, which is that it’s almost impossible for the mobile industry or application developers to innovate with it.  The form and accuracy of the GPS signals, and the specifications that define them are owned by the US government.  There is no way for any development community to change or develop them - they just have to work with what they’re given.  So you get location, location, location (and time), but that’s it.

Bluetooth low energy works anywhere.  It doesn’t need clusters of satellites.  It works wherever you can stick a transmitter mote that’s around the size of a coin.  That means it works inside a shop, an office or a basement just as well as it does when it’s outdoors on a tree or a lamp post.  Moreover, unlike GPS, it’s based on a standard which is developed by the industry which makes the devices that will use it.  So as new use cases appear, the standard can evolve to offer new functionality.  That makes it very attractive to developers, as they feel in control.  It also allows them to tailor the messages they want these devices to send.  They may use the same NEMA format as GPS satellites, providing indoor coordinates to complement the outdoor GPS signals, but they can also provide more information on what is around you, whether that’s the name of the shop, the aisle you’re in at the supermarket, or the band playing in the club.  They also have the ability to provide time sensitive local information if they’re connected to a source of information telling them what is changing.

The biggest change this brings is the ability to provide local information wherever you want for an infrastructure cost of dollars.  Start to think about what you could tell people and their applications if you had a pocketful of these devices to stick onto walls?  It’s not just the obvious thinks like knowing where you are, but how you can interact with it and then share that information with your social networks.

If you’re using, or developing for today’s location sensitive applications, like Gowalla, Foursquare or Loopt, start thinking about what you could do with these if you had granularity of location information within a building or even a room?  It opens up new possibilities for designers of multi-player games (read Cory Doctorow’s Little Brother to understand why people would want to do that), for advertising, and for adding intelligence to the things we carry with us. 

Presence means we no longer need to decipher where we are and tell our devices.  They will know just as well as we do, and will be able to change the way they work to make them best suited for wherever that may be.  It lets them use that knowledge to inform our social networks or the way we interact with our environment.  So you’ll be able to use Twitter’s Places feature to let friends know exactly which shop you’re tweeting from.  Applications like Foodspotting will automatically include the restaurant name with each photo, making it much, much easier to use.  That ability to tag a photo with a location when you’re inside is likely to make applications like this much more compelling.

Of course, it will need a critical mass of presence transmitters, and we’ve yet to see who will provide and deploy them.  Some property managers, such as mall owners may provide them.  It makes sense to build them into every new shop sign.  It will be interesting to see whether companies like Localeze, who provide the location based search engine behind services like Twitter will expand their business offering to include supplying companies registering on their database with presence transmitters.  And also whether existing location search providers deploy them to extend their coverage and applications.

For developers, it opens up a new era of innovation.  The phones and devices will start appearing in 2011.  Now’s the time to begin imagining what you can do with them.  Stop worrying about where you are and start thinking about how you will interact with your surroundings.