Bracing for Bluetooth's Bite

Sourcing Bluetooth's place in consumer history is close, but close only counts in horseshoes.

Janet Jetsetter races down the freeway to pick up her daughter at the airport. She whips her Palm VII out of her blazer pocket to locate her daughter's mobile-phone number. After finding it, she hits the dial button and chucks her Palm back into her pocket. The device, being Bluetooth-enabled, initiates an instant connection to Janet's mobile phone, which rests securely on her right hip. Toting her new Ericsson headset, Janet speaks to her daughter hands-free as she zips past the traffic.

This scenario is one that, after more than a 2-year delay, the Bluetooth special interest group (SIG) plans to manifest for consumers and mobile professionals alike beginning this year (www.bluetooth.com). But, for all of the hype about Bluetooth-enabled devices, they aren't exactly crowding the shelves of consumer electronics stores.

Bluetooth's Cavities

Some of the 1998 estimations made by the initial five promoters of the SIG Ericsson, IBM, Intel, Nokia, and Toshiba may have navely configured the amount of time it would take to finalize the specifications of a short-range wireless protocol. And while strength may be found in numbers, the addition of another 2,069 companies to the SIG since 1998 poses its own unique set of challenges.

Whenever you have this kind of industrywide, de facto standard that everybody at least superficially favors, you just run into the problem that it's very slow to get all of the specific standards and protocols accepted and out in the marketplace, versus if one company just took the lead and developed it all themselves, says Elliott Hamilton, The Strategis Group (www.strategisgroup.com) global wireless group director.

A related factor stifling Bluetooth's emergence is cost. Manufacturers have to discern whether or not implementing a new feature gives them enough differentiation to be worth the added cost. Microchip manufacturers have been trying to develop an economical chipset that can be embedded in the various devices phones, laptops, PDAs, printers to make them Bluetooth-enabled. Talk circulating in the industry posits $5 as the eventual target of a Bluetooth chipset eventual being the key word here.

Troy Holtby, 3Com (www.3com.com) product manager for mobile products, sees a catch-22 at work: It's not going to get cheap until people buy more. And people aren't going to buy more until it becomes cheap.

Consumer adaptation of this technology depends upon the ubiquity of devices.

And when some of those products and their corresponding services hit the store shelves such as Motorola's Timeport 270 phone and PC-enabler card (www.motorola.com), and Nokia's Connectivity Pack that works with its model 6210 phone (www.nokia.com) members of the Bluetooth SIG still may not have overcome their biggest Bluetooth-ache, the 11Mb/s wireless networking protocol that's known as Apple's AirPort in the Macintosh world and as 802.11b in the PC world.

The 802.11b protocol poses many challenges to Bluetooth, both from a technological and a marketing standpoint. Both protocols operate in the same unregulated 2.4GHz frequency spectrum. The difference is that 802.11b is an enterprise tool that requires an infrastructure, generally networking in a corporation, and it delivers much higher data rates than Bluetooth (the latter transmits data up to 30m at 720kb/s). Bluetooth's modus operandi is ad-hoc networking, or the ability to form networks on the fly without having a single server device attending to many clients.

But Bluetooth might be able to offload some of 802.11b's use in a corporation, says Skip Bryan, Ericsson (www.ericsson.com) director of technological market development. Suppose that two or three co-workers share a printer: It needn't be on the network backbone.

Maybe it's just a local printer that can be shared via Bluetooth so that takes some of the workload and congestion off of the Internet within a corporation and distributes it in a more useful fashion to the people who are really using that particular printer, he says.

The problem with this over-lapping functionality or with 802.11b and Bluetooth even remotely coming into contact with each other is that they will significantly interfere with each other's transmissions, so much so that the 802 connection will be completely destroyed. A confrontation looms on the horizon, when Bluetooth-enabled devices begin to infest 802.11b-powered corporate environments from the bottom up. It seems highly improbable that IT department managers will issue edicts that force workers to leave their Bluetooth-enabled mobile phones, PDAs and laptops in their cars, but if this issue of incompatibility is not addressed by the SIG, then it will come down to these two technologies competing, and I think both products will be marginalized in that event, Holtby says.

Bluetooth and 802.11b also will square off on the marketing front. The challenge for Bluetooth to differentiate itself from 802.11b to consumers will be huge, according to Sarah Kim, Yankee Group wireless mobile technologies planning services analyst (www.yankeegroup.com).

Can I tell the difference between 802.11 and Bluetooth? They keep telling me yes; they're two different products. I understand that. But would my mom be able to walk into a store, pick up a box and know that she's the right user for the right product? I'm not convinced, she says.

Chomping at the Bit

Such hurdles, though, have not instilled a defeatist spirit among the SIG's ranks. The goal of cable replacement between various devices to allow personal-area networking is just the tip of the iceberg.

Think of the possibilities, Bryan says. A lot of the products being readied are for access points, so I can access the Internet or Ethernet from a Bluetooth node, say at an airport or sports arena, to give me the information I need without waiting in lines.

Mike Wilson, CEO of Red-M (www.red-m.com), a U.K.-based company that develops Bluetooth access servers, envisions three phases in the deployment of Bluetooth networking solutions. The first is cable replacement, where a PDA, for instance, could synchronize with a PC without cables. Second is actual in-building Bluetooth networking, and the third is a truly global infrastructure whereby you can connect those networks in a true personal-area sense.

Pretend that a savvy world-traveler, Torvald Telekom, checks into a particular hotel in London. He is recognized as a preregistered, premiere Bluetooth customer. He can get his key assigned to him with his PDA, open the door to his room with his mobile phone and access the Internet on his laptop, using his mobile phone as a modem. If Torvald were to stay at the same hotel chain in New York, he'd receive the same services. He has effectively linked the Bluetooth networks in London and New York.

Wilson predicts that Bluetooth-enabled devices will start vying for consumer attention in the next three to six months. He believes the technology will trickle down from its target market of mobile professionals to the consumer market by 2003, and that the integrational networks will be established by 2005.

It may seem like a long time to wait to turn a profit, but SIG members believe that their patience will be rewarded.

It's a natural progression that's going to have to happen, so we feel that the wait is definitely worth it, says Matin Moosa, COO of Atinav (www.atinav.com), a provider of universal Internet access that recently applied for SIG membership.

In their euphoria, though, members of the SIG have overlooked one other small problem: whether people even want the wireless technology.

The whole push by the carriers is they want us to use more data, Kim says. This is just another technology that will facilitate the use of data. But our survey shows that people still just want voice. As far as data is concerned, it's a small percentage of users. If you're only planning to surf the Internet on your phone, you don't really need Bluetooth. It's great if you can use data, otherwise it's kind of pointless.

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Urosevich (anna_urosevich@intertec.com) is Telecom Business associate editor.