Tag: Bluetooth

The End of the One Trick Wireless Pony. Or is it?

And then there were none.  Last month Silicon Labs acquired Ember – the last independent ZigBee chip manufacturer.  It’s good news for the Smart Metering industry as it’s secured a future for Ember, who have become the chip and protocol stack supplier of choice for a large proportion of smart meters, IHDs and home gateways in the market today.  It’s not such good news for the investment community, as the $72 million initial consideration from SiLabs is a little short of the $89 million investment that had gone into Ember.  But given the fire sales of the other ZigBee start-ups, it’s still not a bad result.

And it could be one of those excellent fits that don’t come along that often.  For Silicon Labs, it extends their radio technology into the hotly contested 2.4GHz band, complementing their very capable sub-GHz range of EZRadio PRO chips.  It also gives them what I’d consider to be the best ZigBee stack on the market.  And it gives Ember what must be a very comforting degree of financial security as well as a ready made range of sub-GHz radios, just at the point where the UK and Japanese smart metering communities are looking at 868MHz. 

But it’s not just Ember getting gobbled up.  A few weeks later, Samsung quietly acquired Nanoradio – the Swedish specialist in low power Wi-Fi for mobile phones.  Both Ember and Nanoradios played the standards card and had essentially become one trick wireless ponies – a fate common to many wireless start-ups.  Perversely, CSR did the opposite thing today, by divesting itself of much of its location technology, (which it had acquired from SiRF), to Samsung, who seem to be getting rather good at acquiring bits of wireless technology. In doing so CSR moved itself back closer to its Bluetooth roots.

Although the prospect of an acquisition is the raison d’être of most wireless silicon start-ups, I wonder whether this flurry of activity indicates that we’re nearing an end-game?  In which case, what comes next?

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The Cost of Wireless Standards

How much does it cost to produce a wireless standard?  And how long does it take?  Surprisingly those aren’t questions that are asked very often – probably because most developers are happy to use what already exists rather than starting again from scratch.

In the UK, some members of the smart metering programme have begun asking these questions, potentially for the wrong reasons.  They’ve realised that ZigBee – the current front-runner for the UK smart metering deployment, can’t provide the range to cope with every single house or block of flats, and have started wondering about whether it might make sense to start again from scratch.

A few years ago, when I was writing my book on the Essentials of Short Range Wireless I attempted to put some numbers to those questions.  It seems an appropriate time to publish them, as the answers are a lot more and a lot longer than most people think.

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In Praise of Cables

For most of the last twenty or so years I seem to have started off the year by writing an article claiming that this would finally be the one when wireless data takes off.  It’s nice to see things changing: Wi-Fi is finally starting to move outside internet access for PCs and Phone, Bluetooth Smart is appearing in desirable consumer devices and should trigger an avalanche of connected accessories, and smart metering is bringing ZigBee and Wireless M-Bus into homes as a static PAN.  That doesn’t mean that there are not still massive unexplored opportunities in M2M, but it’s good progress.

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.

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My Last Nokia

The recent partnership between Nokia and Microsoft has created a lot of comment, with the more upbeat view being that it combines Microsoft’s skill in software with Nokia’s expertise in hardware.  That reminded me of the quote from Bernard Shaw to a beautiful actress who suggested they should have a baby so that their child would have her beauty and his brains.  “But Madam,” Shaw retorted, “what if the child has my looks and your brains?”  We don’t yet know what this union will bear, but there are good reasons for asking whether many phone users have already bought their last Nokia?

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”.

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Let the Wireless Wars Begin

It’s been an interesting week for the short range wireless standards.  The two terrible teenagers, ANT and ZigBee have both shown signs of their growing maturity, starting to position themselves as far more serious contenders in the market place.  In the wake of their move from adolescence, a new toddler has emerged in the form of Toumaz, with their announcement of their Telran chip.

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.

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The Evolution of Interoperability. Making the Dream a Reality.

I’ve been attending a lot of Smart Energy meetings recently and listening to industry experts talking about the need for interoperability in the connections between smart meters and appliances around the home.  I’ve also been hearing a number of standards organisations trying to promote the message that the concepts of interoperability and a standard are synonymous.  That’s a very dangerous message, because the two are only very loosely related.  Just because you have a standard, it does not mean that products which use it are, or will become interoperable.

To understand why equating a standard with interoperability is a fallacy, let’s start with an analogy.  In many ways, a standard is like a language.  So we could define English, or French or Russian as standards.  The standards bodies would then claim that everyone who speaks the same language is interoperable.  I’d disagree.  The language defines the grammar and the vocabulary, but you only have to listen to a Democrat and Republican senator debating health reforms to understand that speaking the same language does nothing to promote interoperability.  If anything, a standard provides the tools to ensure that conflict is more, rather than less likely to occur.

Interoperability is about working together seamlessly.  To achieve that requires more than just a standard.  It needs a set of interoperability tests and the testing tools to confirm compliance with those tests.  These don’t generally come with a standard – they need to be put in place to support it.  That entails time and money, which means most standards can’t support them until they’re already fairly well established.  Industries like Smart Energy demand interoperability, as they want the meters they install today to work with devices that customers may install in ten or twenty years’ time.  But if they want to achieve it, they, need to understand how this process works.

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