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Bluetooth Evolution Conference (2) : Really, really fast Bluetooth
November 01, 2007
I'm at the Bluetooth Evolution Conference in London, yesterday and today. I'm partly here to educate myself on some aspects of where the Bluetooth standard is headed, and Day One proved very educational. The focus for the day was High Speed Bluetooth - which I've mentioned here before, and is the name given to a new version of the standard that will have much higher data rates.
High-Speed Bluetooth will enable such useful scenarios as downloading a full album to a device in about a second (yes please!), or grabbing a DVD-quality movie from a kiosk in about 30 seconds.
The High Speed Bluetooth plan for dummies is as follows:
- Integrate Ultra-Wide Band support in to the Bluetooth Standard (using the WiMedia Alliance's version of UWB)
- The Bluetooth Standard will remain backward compatible - so everything that works now continues to work
- The UWB elements at the lower levels (PHY and MAC layers) co-exist with the current Bluetooth Baseband and PHY layers, and are intended to be used only when needed (this means they don't drain power when not in use)
Several of the presentations covered how and why UWB is a great match for Bluetooth, providing significantly higher bandwidth (480Mbps at 2-4 meters, 110Mbps at 10 meters), good spatial separation (you can have lots of them around the house without causing interference to other wireless stuff or each other) and a really low power cost for transmission (downloading that movie won't blow your battery).
All in all - very compelling, and as a consumer, I'd have to say: I want it!
One of the interesting debates on the day broke out when there was open speculation about whether Bluetooth could do the same trick (incorporate a higher speed underlying transport), but with 802.11 (Wireless LAN) instead of UWB. Why would they do this? Peter Judge of TechWorld gives his own take on the debate here. He seems to take the view that some of the players consider Wireless LAN an alternative to UWB, and are frustrated with UWB progress.
I have to say, that's not exactly what I heard them say. My overall takeaway was: UWB will happen, and is happening in Asia (of course) already. I got the sense that one or two phone manufacturers may test the waters for higher speeds in Bluetooth using Wireless LAN for very specific use cases, but that this didn't amount to a full-on "let's switch from UWB" plan. For a variety of reasons (security, speed, antenna requirements and design purpose), I think UWB is very much on solid ground for High Speed Bluetooth.
The sooner the better.
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