The potential of Bluetooth low energy was eloquently demonstrated at this week’s ISPOO conference in Germany, when the winners of the first year of the Bluetooth Innovation World Cup awards were announced. The competition has been running for the last year, inviting individuals and companies to submit ideas for new sports and fitness products that will be made possible by the new Bluetooth low energy standard.
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…
Bluetooth low energy – the Momentum Builds
It’s been a good week for Bluetooth low energy. At times it’s felt like a long, slow path since it was first announced as Wibree in October 2006, but that feeling is changing as the standard is coming to completion. This week saw the first Bluetooth low energy conference take place in Munich where chips vendors were showing off demos, whilst on the other side of the world, at the ARM Techcon in Santa Clara, there were more live demonstrations of the technology.
The mood of the industry has become increasingly upbeat. It was noticeable in Munich that a significant number of companies have moved from cautious interest to being serious about starting to deploy it. The questions that they are asking have changed to the practical ones of qualification and access to test equipment. That change in mood was reinforced by the Bluetooth SIG announcing that the specification is on course to be released this December.
The Bluetooth low energy standard can be confusing at first. Although it carries the name Bluetooth, it is a completely new radio with a completely new protocol stack on top of it. It has been designed from scratch to allow developers to add connectivity to products that only want to send small pieces of data on an irregular basis, but with such low power consumption that it can run on coin cells. The companies attending the Conference in Munich have understood that difference and are keen to exploit the new products and service models that Bluetooth low energy offers.
Peer-to-peer vs Femtocells. Let the topology war begin.
Two of the new wireless technologies that have come to the fore this year are high speed peer to peer connectivity and femtocells. Although they may not appear to have any obvious connection, I would argue that they do. Moreover that connection is so strong that they will end up fighting a technology war between themselves for a key customer application. That’s because they both have a major impact on the way that users transfer data between their personal devices. Today these two technologies are barely aware of each other – they’re both too busy gazing at their respective technical navels and ignoring the user requirements. Within twelve months, when they understand the real use cases they’re enabling, they may well be at each other’s throats.
Continua Health Alliance takes the bigamous route – Bluetooth and ZigBee.
After months of debate, the Continua Health Alliance finally announced its choice of wireless technology for low power medical devices. Bluetooth low energy and ZigBee have been the key antagonists in this process and today Continua decided to make it a threesome and share its bed with both partners.
Both brides proudly announced the forthcoming nuptials, Bluetooth claiming that it had been chosen as the Health Device Standard, and ZigBee pronouncing that it has been selected for the next generation standard.
Whilst most people outside the specification groups will dismiss this as irrelevant, it does have some important implications, as it presents medical device manufacturers with a dilemma – which of these two wireless standards do they choose? We’re at a point in time where we’re about to witness a new phenomenon of internet connected, consumer medical devices, which will open up the possibility of a new era of personal healthcare. If manufacturers become confused about which of two incompatible standards to use, they’ll delay their products, with a resulting delay in availability and implementation. It’s important that doesn’t happen.