Bluetooth – Page 3 – Creative Connectivity

Why LTE should wait for 2.3GHz

In the last blog I wrote about the immense damage that could be done to the market for connected personal devices and the Internet of Things by licensing the 2.3GHz spectrum to mobile networks. As OFCOM is still asking for consultation responses prior to their auction I thought it timely to list some of the reasons that I believe justify a delay in releasing this spectrum. If you agree that it should be postponed, you have until June 26^th to send OFCOM your views. Please do, as I believe this could cost the industry billions of pounds and push back innovation.

The battle is between mobile network operators, who want more spectrum and the ongoing survival of the 2.4GHz band. The 2.4GHz spectrum is unlicensed, and used by the wireless standards in most consumer devices, including Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, ZigBee and others. If mobile phones start to use frequencies close to 2.4GHz, it will degrade the performance of these products. Your Internet access may slow down, audio bars and Sonos systems may get noisy, hearing aids will perform poorly, the response of smart home systems could get sluggish or stop. Everything that uses the 2.4GHz band may work less well and have a reduced range, to the point where they’re no longer compelling devices. If that happens, users will stop buying products, businesses may close, investors will lose their money and the current Internet of Things bubble will be firmly burst.

There are a lot of “mays” in that. That’s because we can’t be sure. To their credit, OFCOM have commissioned some tests which show that there is a problem, but they didn’t test enough, or new enough products to determine the true extent of the problem. OFCOM’s response is to say that manufacturers need to redesign their products to be more resistant to interference. However, that adds cost, the technology is not yet available for small products and it can’t be retrofitted to the billions of existing products already on the market. For that reason I believe any auction should be delayed to give the industry time to test and see if it can develop solutions. Otherwise the costs could be enormous.

FCC and OFCOM plans threaten the Internet of Things

If you’ve invested in any Internet of Things companies or bought a smart thermostat or Apple watch you may live to regret it. Current plans by the people who regulate the radio spectrum – OFCOM in the UK and the FCC in the US have plans in place which may stop most of these devices working. As a result they could cost investors and the industry hundreds of trillions of dollars.

To most people this is a very obscure technical subject, but I’d urge you to read on. The problem is that the debate is being conducted by regulatory specialists, who appear to have little idea of the damage they may be doing. The consequences are not percolating up to CEOs and investors, who should be screaming blue murder. The result of that resounding silence could be that any products that use Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, ZigBee, Thread or any other radio that works at 2.4GHz will degrade or stop working. That includes your home internet, smart watches, fitness trackers, hearing aids, smart meters, health monitors, wireless headsets; in fact most of the products which collectively are beginning the make up the Internet of Things. It will be a self-imposed wound which could put the industry back ten years, allowing China and others to leapfrog to a position of technical leadership.

Investing in Wireless Standards, or 802.11ad – Mad, Bad and Dangerous to Know?

Investing in a new wireless standard can be an expensive experiment. The investment can be vast, as I’ve described in a previous article on the cost of wireless standards. It’s not unusual for the combined cost of writing and bringing a standard to market to run into billions of dollars. When a standard loses out to a competing one, it’s a heavy loss both for the VCs who have invested in it as well as the companies who have worked on it. The problem is that there’s not been a good way of determining in advance which standards will succeed and which will fail.

Up until this point, the only real yardstick has been the Intel test. That’s the principal that if Intel invests heavily in a wireless standard (think HomeRF, WiMedia or WiMax), then the standard will fail spectacularly. Conversely, if Intel withdraws its development effort from a wireless standard, as they did in the early days of Bluetooth back in 2002, then the standard will be a roaring success. The Intel test isn’t a perfect one – it fails to predict the acceptance of Wi-Fi, but with a track record of four predictions out of five, it’s a lot better than just flipping a coin.

What the industry needs is a new test. I’m going to suggest the Byron test. It’s a more literary approach, suited to the alphabet soup of the 802.11 family of wireless standards and inspired by the popular description of the romantic poet as “mad, bad and dangerous to know”.

Zombie Wireless Standards

Back in 2010, Mark Thomas, the head of PA Consulting’s Strategy and Market practice published a book called The Zombie Economy. In it he defined a Zombie company as one which is generating just about enough cash to service its debt, so the bank is not obliged to pull the plug on the loan. The issue with such companies is that they can limp along, and just about survive, but as they don’t have enough money to invest, they fall over once the economy picks up, as they become uncompetitive. The problem they pose is that by continuing to exist in this Zombie state they threaten the development of other companies, acting as a damper to more sustainable businesses.

It struck me that there’s a close analogy in the area of wireless standards where we have what are effectively Zombie wireless standards. There’s not necessarily anything fundamentally wrong with these individual standards, other than that they have failed to get traction and so limp along. Here, the problem is that they tend to jealously claim a particular application sector or market segment, blocking other more successful standards from entering. That has a damping effect on product development, creating silos which keep putting off innovation in the hope that one day the standard will gain traction, constantly delaying growth and interoperability. Because they’re not being incorporated into enough products, they have effectively lost their ability to function and have become half-dead, half-alive ‘Zombies’.

I think it’s time to recognise the damage that this is doing. Rather than pursuing multiple parallel paths, the industry needs to concentrate on a far smaller number of short range wireless standards. They in turn need to embrace the requirements of a wider range of sectors.

Bluetooth. From Wii to wee.

There are certain products that I’ve always wanted to see appear on the market. Not necessarily because I want to have one, but because they appeal to the imagination and the concept of what it’s possible to do. One of these is the Bluetooth toilet. It’s a product I’ve suggested should exist in various presentations I’ve given over the years as an example of something that may initially sound silly, but could be quite useful. My argument is that amongst other things it could be a valid way of checking how often a toilet is used, which could be an early indicator for prostate cancer. Normally you can count on the Consumer Electronics Show – CES, which kicked off in Las Vegas this week, for some fairly off-the wall, wacky products, but as far as the Bluetooth toilet is concerned, someone else got in first.

The first company that I’m aware of to wirelessly enable a toilet was Greengoose, who have a sensor that you can fit to the toilet seat to determine whether or not it’s been left up by the most recent male user. They see it as a fun application, and there’s nothing wrong with that. However, just before CES got going I came across a far more serious Bluetooth toilet from Lixil in Japan. There’s even a promotional video of it.

Choosing a Wireless Standard

The first question that most designers ask when adding wireless to their product is “which wireless standard to use?” In some cases, where it is connecting to an existing product, that’s easy to answer. If it’s not, it’s a lot more difficult. It’s one reason I wrote a book about it – to try and help designers answer that question. But another part of the same question is how well the different standards promote themselves as a solution?

This year has seen some major changes within some of those wireless standards. The ZigBee Alliance has lost Benno Ritter – for many years the global marketing face of ZigBee. And the Bluetooth SIG has replaced its Chairman, Mike Foley, as well as its CTO, Andy Glass. Both are interesting moves, as each of these standards is still evolving. ZigBee is taking on smart lighting, home automation and smart metering, whilst Bluetooth is finally seeing Bluetooth Smart appearing in the mainstream. In a recent issue of Incisor magazine, Vince Holton wrote about the loss of passion within the Bluetooth SIG – a sentiment that I’d echo and also extend to some of the other wireless standards. But that’s an opinion formed from being close to these groups. A few years ago I ran to survey to try and see what the general engineering opinion was of the different wireless standards. Prompted by Vince’s article, I thought it would be useful to run the survey again to see what designers think as we approach the end of 2012.