Small Bites

First Bluetooth applications stick to the basics.

After years of hype, you’d think Bluetooth was capable of producing small miracles. Bluetooth boosters have dazzled us with stories of intelligent refrigerators, regaled us with promises of never having to wait in a hotel check-in line again and painted a portrait of a world in which wires no longer exist.

The more the industry hypes the capabilities and promise of Bluetooth, the more analysts and the masses wonder when those products will appear. And as those first products start appearing, they are invariably disappointed. It’s hard to get excited by a fancy-looking Bluetooth earpiece or PCMCIA card when you’ve been promised the world suspended without wires, said Rob Gear, Ovum (www.ovum.com) analyst.

“It’s gotten ridiculous - people are talking about developing Bluetooth coffee cups,” he said. “Even the Bluetooth SIG (special interest group) is guilty. On their Web site (www.bluetooth.com), they promote the idea (that) you can use your phone as a walkie-talkie. With a range of about 10 meters, why would you need a walkie-talkie? Just raise your voice.”

According to a recent Ovum study, Bluetooth is making inroads, just not in the areas you’d expect. Characterizing the current hype surrounding Bluetooth as “technological myopia,” the study states that the immediate future of Bluetooth lies in thoroughly unsexy connectivity applications being designed for enterprises and basic public-access solutions. Like it or not, those unexciting basic applications have to incubate before the truly fantastical solutions of recent hype can emerge, the study concludes.

“Bluetooth needs to fade into the background,” said Gear, one of the study’s authors. “The mass market doesn’t get excited about Bluetooth technology itself.”

It’s in the enterprise market where a lot of these types of applications are quietly making their mark.

Bluetooth PBX
A tiny U.K. start-up, Norwood Systems (www.norwoodsystems.com ), is developing what essentially is a wireless PBX that overlays a business’s LAN. Employees can take their phone extensions with them as they move around the office. The key, however, is how the technology is hidden within the LAN itself, said Paul Østergaard, Norwood chairman & CEO. Except for the earpieces employees would sport as they wander around, the rest of the network is invisible. The access points are PC cards installed directly into a computer’s empty PCI slot. Those cards communicate with the Ethernet cards in the individual computers sending voice traffic directly into the network.

“We’re hiding a lot of complexity here,” Østergaard said. “The idea is to radically simplify the process. This kind of product doesn’t require any special installation, unlike an 802.11 network. We include software that maps out the best possible network layout. Any IT department can install it easily.”

Østergaard said Norwood would roll out its first commercial network in August. It then plans to market off-the-shelf solutions targeting small enterprises with 10 to 15 employees.

Tracking Device
InTransit Networks (www.intransitnetworks.com) also is building its first prototype system. This Bluetooth network isn’t for an office, though. It’s for a warehouse, a seemingly unlikely place for a consumer-focused technology. But Bob Twitchell, InTransit CTO, disagrees. He believes Bluetooth will revolutionize warehousing, tracking and shipping. InTransit has designed what essentially is a package label embedded with a Bluetooth transceiver. The labels carry data on what the parcel contains, where it’s heading and other inventory details, and it communicates with the network via access points installed at the warehouse, in trucks or in rail cars. Those trucks and rail cars communicate back to the network via a satellite or terrestrial fleet tracking network.

“If you can inventory an entire factory with just one click of mouse - now that’s the Holy Grail,” Twitchell said.

Of course, as with any new technology, there are problems to iron out. Norwood is working out handover problems with its Bluetooth PBX. Passing signals seamlessly from access point to access point is not something inherent within the Bluetooth standard, as opposed to cellular networks, which were designed so that a user can move between base stations with no perceptible interruption of service. Norwood has developed its own solution and is lobbying the SIG to have handover standardized in later versions of the Bluetooth standard.

InTransit’s difficulties stem from critical-mass issues. Thousands of Bluetooth transmitters in the same warehouse all screaming at the same frequency create indecipherable white noise. But part of InTransit’s package is an operating system that manages when and how long each transceiver transmits its information. This type of application trial and error is how a technology develops and evolves, Ovum’s Gear said.

“It’s not like you’re seeing massive adoption at this stage,” he said. “You’re seeing small-scale experimentation.”

Bluetooth may be in the small-scale experimentation stages, but the technology is definitely set to make its mark in the enterprise space, Gear said.

“Ad hoc connectivity is Bluetooth’s strength - bringing random devices together and allowing them to have some kind of meaningful connectivity,” Gear said. “It’s tailor-made for the enterprises.”

Making nice to the enterprise space has another benefit: putting Bluetooth devices into people’s hands. Those ephemeral consumer devices the industry has over-hyped will never appear until a significant portion of the populace starts carrying around some sort of Bluetooth device. Gear described the problem as a typical “chicken and egg” situation. Microsoft won’t incorporate Bluetooth into Windows XP, and hotels won’t start installing instant check-in access points at their front desks until Bluetooth has a significant presence in the consumer-device market. It’s a question of network economics, Gear said. When the network parameters are small and manageable - such as in an 802.11 network or in a simple wireless-connection laptop and cellular phone - the benefits of Bluetooth are obvious. When you expand those parameters to incorporate the mass public, you have a much more daunting situation, Gear said.