Jun 18, 2007 12:00 PM,

Welcoming Wibree

Kevin Fitchard

Just like every other industry talking head, I panned the new Wibree when Nokia first unveiled it in October. A proprietary personal area network, or PAN, technology Nokia developed in its labs for five years, it was hard to get excited about this new low-power radio.

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Though Nokia insisted it didn't, it competed directly with Bluetooth, adding yet another technology in the already confusing space of short-distance wireless communications that has come to encompass everything from near-field communications to radio frequency ID, ultrawideband and Zigbee. Considering the trials Bluetooth went through to gain widespread adoption, Nokia just seemed to be gunking up the works. But to Nokia's credit, it did what Nokia said it would: launched an industry forum, inviting chip- and device-makers to contribute to an ad hoc standard and then negotiating with the Bluetooth Special Interest Group, which lead to it being incorporated into the Bluetooth specification. Wibree occupies the low-end of the PAN spectrum in terms of overall capacity and power consumption. It uses dynamic packet lengths ideal for low-power button-cell types of devices like wristwatches.

While the Bluetooth SIG may not have had a comparable technology, it was certainly developing one. Bluetooth is everywhere these days, embedded in mid- and high-end phones, in headsets and even in Nintendo's new Wii gaming console, putting ever growing capacity demands on the spec. The SIG incorporated ultrawideband into the specification to meet those demands, and when it began looking for a technology to fill in the low end of the spec, Nokia came knocking.

What this means is that the two Blueteeth will be compatible: dual-mode Wibree/ultrawideband chips in more powerful devices will be able to communicate with Wibree-only devices in smaller devices. It may not sound like an earth-shattering concept, but it beats the alternative. A turf war between the largest handset-maker and the Bluetooth standard would have been messy.