Back in my May 6th 2005 blog (BLUETOOTH’s FUTURE: Merging onto the WiMedia Alliance UWB Superhighway), I commented that it was inevitable for the Bluetooth SIG to ultimately adopt the WiMedia UWB standard as the basis upon which to build a high speed version of Bluetooth. At the time, I called it “Bluetooth-3,” or BT3 for short. In a separate item on September 8th of 2005, (Very High Speed Bluetooth is Coming - All Aboard WiMedia) I speculated on what a future BT3 might look like. My perspective in both articles was that if you looked objectively at the needs of Bluetooth technology to be a worldwide solution, ultimately the Bluetooth SIG would see the wisdom and consumer benefit of adopting the WiMedia Alliance’s UWB specifications. Earlier today, that is precisely what happened. The Bluetooth SIG’s Executive Director, Dr. Michael Foley, announced the decision to build a future high-speed version of Bluetooth based on the WiMedia UWB specifications. Dr. Foley commented that he anticipated the first preliminary products to support high speed Bluetooth could be expected in the middle of 2007. As inevitable as this announcement ultimately was, the most important thing about it is what it portends for consumers. Consistent with the original vision of the WiMedia Common Radio Platform (which was first introduced two years ago in February of 2004 at the Intel Developers Forum in San Francisco), the Bluetooth SIG’s announcement will provide consumers with many benefits:

• First, one radio subsystem will be able to support both high speed Bluetooth as well as Certified Wireless USB and TCP/IP. The benefit is that a consumer needn’t pay for three different radios just because they want products that use three different protocols. An additional and very important benefit of having Certified Wireless USB and BT3 share the same radio platform is that they avoid a scenario where the two standards would interfere with one another
• Second, by utilizing the same radio platform that will be shipping in high volume in the PC and portable electronics market, the cost of the solution will be driven down.
• Finally, and most importantly, this move by the Bluetooth SIG benefits consumers because it will transparently extend the value of Bluetooth applications to the higher speeds of UWB. Bluetooth throughput will be improved from its current 0.7 Mbps or 3Mbps to new speeds ranging from 53.3Mbps to 480Mbps. That is 20 to 150 times faster than today’s Bluetooth. A different way to think about the boost in speed is to consider transferring 75MB of data using today’s 3Mbps Bluetooth. It would take 6 whole minutes (assuming 50% efficiency). However, with the new high speed, WiMedia UWB based Bluetooth, the same 75MB transfer could be done in as little as 2 seconds. That is a terrific difference. Not only will the files transfer much faster, but it the transfer will actually use much, much less battery power as well!

An interesting question then is, “How will portable devices in the future utilize a WiMedia UWB based common radio platform which supports both W-USB and BT-3?” My perspective goes something like this: for applications that synchronize with a PC or mimic PC applications on a peer-to-peer basis, WUSB will be the dominate protocol. This includes applications such as music file transfers, video file transfers, calendar synchronization and photo file transfers. Even though some of these are possible using Bluetooth today, WUSB will be the dominate means to do this in the UWB era. Where I see BT-3 coming into play is for TCP/IP applications. In particular, I envision wireless video from portable devices using TCP/IP. Here I see handset manufacturers choosing to modify and re-use the TCP/IP Bluetooth profile to create connections from video broadcast enabled handsets to the HDTVs of the future.

For our part here at Alereon, we have been enthusiastic about the vision of the WiMedia common radio platform supporting high speed Bluetooth alongside Certified Wireless USB for some time. To that end, we worked closely with Open Interface, a leading Bluetooth software company, to demonstrate the Bluetooth protocol stack running over an Alereon WiMedia radio platform at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas this past January. Likewise, Dr. Foley used an improved version of our same demonstration at his talk earlier today. This is just one of the ways we’re bringing “life without wires™” one step closer to reality.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 28th, 2006 at 10:27 am and is filed under Bluetooth, UWB. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.