Wireless – Page 7 – Creative Connectivity

Bluetooth low energy – aiming for the trillions

Today the Bluetooth SIG formally adopted the full specification for Bluetooth low energy and made it available for public download. It’s exciting – they’re firing the starting pistol for a new ecosystem of innovative products and applications that will change the way we think about the things around us.

Bluetooth low energy is not just a variant of the existing Bluetooth specification – it’s an entirely new standard that’s been optimised for low power and internet connectivity. It marks a step change in short range wireless, providing a new short range connection for a new decade.

Full Bluetooth low energy standard published

This week, at the Bluetooth annual All Hands Meeting in Seattle, the final draft of the new Bluetooth low energy specification was made available. Last December, the core specification for the low energy radio was adopted, allowing silicon vendors to start their production process, so that chips would be available as soon as the rest of the specification is adopted. This week’s release allows software and application developers to begin work on designing the new ecosystem of products that will be use Bluetooth low energy.

Outside the confines of the technical working groups, Bluetooth low energy is still a fairly well kept secret. Yet it has the potential to overtake Bluetooth usage in just a few years, growing to a volume of multiple billions of chips per year. It is the only wireless technology that has the potential to challenge and surpass the shipment volumes of cellular. Yet even within the Bluetooth community, there are many that have not yet understood this potential.

One of the reasons for that lack of understanding is that Bluetooth low energy is a wireless standard for a new generation of applications. Every previous wireless standard comes from the mindset of being a cable replacement which connects devices that never change their behaviour. That is true even if there’s a mesh involved. And it’s the way that most products were designed until a year or two ago.

Two things have changed that. The first is the concept of machine-to-machine communications where products connect directly to the Internet. The second is the emergence of the Apps store, where handset owners can download and install new features every day. Bluetooth low energy has a new architecture that fits both of these models. Even more importantly, it allows them to converge. As such, it is the first wireless technology designed for the second decade of this century. Here’s why…

OneAPI to bind them.

There’s trouble in Mobile Earth. Or so it appeared at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona last week. Darkness is spreading throughout the networks, as the twin towers of Apple and Android continue to suck application developers into their empires. But help was at hand. Step forward those plucky little hobbits at the GSM Association. Prior to the Conference their ivory burrow had been echoing to the sound of furry feet as they hastily put together the Wholesale Applications Community (WAC) to thwart those twin evils of the cellular world.

ARPU is precious. Brand is even more precious. As without that, you’re just a data pipe. But both are fading. The only thing that consumers appear to value these days is downloadable apps, and lots of them. Last year at MWC, every operator was busy launching their own Apps Store. A year on, the cellular shires have realised fighting alone didn’t work, so they’ve banded together to pit their combined forces against the dark empire.

It’s an odd alliance, and probably one that is doomed to failure.

Cellular 25 – a Celebration

Last night the UK cellular industry gathered in London’s Science Museum to mark twenty-five years of mobile networks in the UK. It was an event that drew together many of the people who have been responsible for the extraordinary explosion of the mobile industry, talking about the history of how it happened, and looking into their crystal balls to try and predict the direction of the next twenty-five years.

It has been an extraordinary journey. I missed the first five years, but have been involved for the last twenty, predominantly trying to encourage data applications and moving services past the phone to internet connected devices. That’s not been the most successful area of the industry, although I believe its time is about to come. What last night proved was how radically the growth of the mobile industry has changed our lives.

Bluetooth low energy – that Eureka moment

One of the nice things about working in technology is those moments when everything clicks and you go “Wow – that’s neat”. It’s something that happens as you work with many of the different standards and you realise that the collective intelligence of those putting it together really is greater than the sum of the parts.

Over the years I’ve had that Eureka moment with a number of wireless standards. They don’t all have it. Wi-Fi doesn’t – it just does a good job of making Ethernet wireless. GSM has it in the unlikely form of SMS. Kevin Holley, who was probably more responsible for SMS than anyone else, should be given an award for that. ZigBee has it – it’s the moment you realise that within the network you’ve just configured, multiple devices can be having their own, independent wireless conversations at the same time.

Despite years of being involved with Bluetooth, I’ve not found it there. Bluetooth is very impressive in its thoroughness, but again, it’s good, competent specmanship, which does what it says on the box. What Bluetooth has done is to provide a solid base of knowledge for the development of the new Bluetooth low energy standard, which was adopted today. Over the last year I’ve been helping develop the standard and explaining it to designers and engineers around the world. During that process I’ve realised that it doesn’t have just one, but two of those Eureka moments. And it’s been obvious at the conferences I’ve been speaking at, that as soon as developers understand it, they share that excitement. These two features are the ability for a device to talk directly to a web application, and how easy it is to use.

Wi-Fi Direct and Bluetooth – battle to the death?

The media lapped up the recent press release from the Wi-Fi Alliance, announcing the birth of Wi-Fi Direct. Almost to a man, they decided once again that it would kill Bluetooth. I suspect that Bluetooth will prove to have something in common with Mark Twain, being able to sit back and calmly repeat that “the report of my death is an exaggeration”.

For many of the reports, that analysis seems to be based on little more than the relative number of press releases that the two organisations send out. For some reason known only to itself, the Bluetooth SIG is remarkably reticent about publicising its technology, preferring to sit quietly on its laurels of shipments of over a billion chips per year (1,050 million in 2008 – IMS). Wi-Fi tends to be more vociferous about its plans, possibly stung by the fact that it manages to ship only just over a third of that (387 million in 2008 – Instat). As is often the case with young pretenders, noise can be rather more noticeable than actions. (Incidentally, no other short range standard gets within an order of magnitude of the lower of these figures.)

A few articles dug down a bit more into the technology itself, and came to less of a conclusion as a result. None of them thought about what really matters, which is what the user experience will look like. So let’s do exactly that…