Bluetooth Archives - Page 5 of 8 - Creative Connectivity

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.

Medica goes Wireless

Medica claims to be the world’s largest medical show. It’s a very monochrome event – all of the equipment is white and shiny, and most of the exhibitors and visitors are soberly dressed in dark suits, as befits the serious profession of medicine and spending money in Dusseldorf. Looking at the equipment on display and the crowds thronging the show, you certainly wouldn’t get any impression that there’s a recession around, other than slightly more suits than normal and rather fewer bow-ties around the necks of the visiting consultants.

As far as the medical industry is concerned, it’s business as usual, and hopefully more so, as more of us get older and less healthy. But there are some interesting trends. One of which is the increased prevalence of wireless connectivity. In previous years equipment manufacturers were happy for nurses to jot down the readings from their instruments. A few devices had wireless links, but they were the exception. This year, particularly at the consumer end of the market, wireless was becoming the norm, at least at the top end of product ranges.

Almost all of that was Bluetooth. I stopped counting after the first hundred devices, and that was in just two of the twenty halls. ANT was in evidence, helped with a demonstration of a prototype X10 Nano phone from Sony Ericsson, which was using the ANT protocol to connect to a weighing scale, heart rate belt and pedometer. Wi-Fi was there in a few products, but mostly confined to tags for asset management, and I failed to find a single ZigBee medical device. There also seemed to be very little profile for the Continua Alliance in terms of products or signage. Even The Intel stand was conspicuously Continua-free.

Unexpectedly Welcome Back – UWB

Mark Twain famously said (or almost said) “rumours of my death have been greatly exaggerated”. Just when you thought it was safe to stay at home and live with slow speed wireless data transfer, UWB has performed a similar reincarnation, appearing to rise, Lazarus-like, from its grave with the announcement of two new chipsets from Samsung and CSR.

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.

Smart Metering – the next Y2K bonanza?

At a number of smart metering and smart grid conferences that I’ve been attending recently, it’s be interesting to note the number of fifty and sixty-something consultants who are looking suspiciously like cats who are overdosing on cream. What has brought the smiles to their faces is their belief that the rush to deploy smart meters is considerably ahead of any solidification of standards, or even an understanding of what to do with them. That means that there will be lots of work to try and make the current generation of meters work, only to do it all over again in five years time, when the industry finally decides what the standards should be. If that’s how it pans out, then smart metering may pay their pensions in the same way that Y2K worries provided a happy retirement for a previous generation of engineers. It might be in their interest, but it’s a game-plan that is definitely not in the best interest of the industry.

Within the more general subject of smart grid, media coverage is centring on smart meters and the impact they will have on the consumer. That’s resulting in some aggressive battles between competing standards groups, a growing level of negative publicity for utilities that are being portrayed as greedy ogres trying to get more money out of the consumer, and the appearance of ever more flamboyant futurologists who believe that the utilities will control all of the appliances in our homes.

That level of noise has the effect of making smart meters look as if they are the lynchpin of the smart grid. Hence every utility is rushing to deploy them, backed by willing legislators showering them with stimulus funds. It’s not difficult to see why we’re in this topsy-turvy state. Underlying improvements to the grid don’t have a direct impact on consumers, or only do when the lack of them means that the consumer’s power disappears. Which makes it boring. In contrast, home automation offers the science fiction vision of devices that turn themselves on or off to minimise our energy bills and save the world. But does it help the industry?

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…

Smart Energy & Strange Alliances

It’s been an odd month for Smart Energy, or at least for the wireless standards that are tackling connectivity around the home. If you were to go back six months, then, at least in the U.S., the general consensus would have been that ZigBee had the market tied up. It had the only profile with “Smart Energy” in its name and was winning the PR battle hands down.

Within the major working groups, things weren’t quite so clear. NIST, which has been trying to herd the wireless cats into some semblance of order started a more thorough analysis of just what existed, which saw an increased emphasis on other members of the IEEE 802 standards family, bolstering the fortunes of Wi-Fi (in its 802.11 incarnation) and Bluetooth (in its 802.15.1-2005 form). And it made its preferences clear about a need for IP support. But the status quo didn’t seem to shift very much as a result.

Then, last month, Bluetooth emerged from its normal mode of PR silence to announce the formation of a Smart Energy Study Group. The fact that Emerson, one of the world’s leading manufacturers of home HVAC devices was one of the sponsors for the group caused some noticeable shivers in the Smart Energy marketplace.

This week, there were more ripples, when Wi-Fi and ZigBee announced their Alliance of Alliances to jointly provide an in-home solution for Smart Energy. The Twitterati thought it significant, but what was behind it? Is it deadly rivals joining forces against a common enemy, or is there more going on?