High Speed Bluetooth

In March 2006, the Bluetooth Special Interest Group (SIG) announced that it was planning to partner with WiMedia Alliance (an industry group composed of such computer giants as Intel, Hewlet-Packard and Microsoft) to bring consumers the best of both worlds with the creation of a new High Speed Bluetooth. Bluetooth is currently used to facilitate slow-speed, short-range applications such as wireless headsets and keyboards. Yet, while its high portability, low power requirements and unique hit-and-run frequency hopping has maintained a lot of interest among critics and consumers, for those who live in the fast lane Bluetooth has been lagging. Until now. UWB, short for Ultra-Wideband technology, is the new kid on the block. Much simpler to build and maintain than Wi-Fi, UWB can also support more users at a higher speed, and with Bluetooth it will use only one ten-thousandth of the power that a normal cell phone requires. However, perhaps the most promising trait of UWB technology is that it prefers not to follow the crowd. This kid doesn’t carry a continuous signal, preferring instead to put out bursts of energy over a wide area, rather like Bluetooth’s own mode of operation. UWB operates in the same frequency as TV monitors, electric razors and fans, and can work in the currently unlicensed radio spectrum that lies above 6 GHz. Little interference (and competition!) means less troubleshooting for the techno-savvy-but-far-from-perfect public.
For those whose interests extend only to how fast this new friend can take them where they want to go, UWB will work along with BlueCore4, the Enhanced Data Rate (or EDR) standard that was ratified by the Bluetooth SIG at the end of 2004. Bluetooth EDR offers speeds of up to 2.1Mbps, a good three times that of original Bluetooth capabilities. This partnership, which will essentially lead to the creation of High Speed Bluetooth, translates to about an 8 second/MB faster data transfer speed. As a result, download speeds for iPods, digital cameras, PCs, etc. will be dramatically improved.
Imagine being able to download an entire album of MP3 songs or hundreds of camera phone images in under a second! How about streaming HD video from a camcorder or advanced mobile phone to a TV. Furthermore, think about the possibility of connecting that same mobile phone to friends' phones in order to play multi-player games. With High Speed Bluetooth, these amazing concepts will eventually become a reality!
Motorola's vision of High Speed Bluetooth, takes these concepts even further. They present a scenario where movies can be downloaded from High Speed Bluetooth enabled kiosks located in malls or airports. Under this concept, you could quickly download movies to a mobile phone, PDA, laptop or any other type of compatible device. Motorola goes on to paint a picture of how you could walk up to a kiosk right before boarding a plane and wirelessly download a movie. Then, once onboard, you could watch the movie directly from the device you downloaded it to, or you could stream it to another device with a larger display (for example, a mobile phone streaming to a laptop).
The functional process of High Speed Bluetooth (or the Bluetooth/UWB partnership) has been likened to a hybrid car. Bluetooth capabilities remain a constant hum, where the UWB, which requires more power, kicks on only when called upon to speed transfer rates or to download large amounts of information or data. Whatever the method, Bluetooth and UWB will both benefit by coming together; their complementary specifications—UWB’s high power consumption versus low-cost and low-power needs for Bluetooth, and high speed capabilities for UWB/low speed for Bluetooth—are sure to appeal to a technologically hungry consumer base.
Final prototyping for the new High Speed Bluetooth should be done with by the fourth quarter of 2007, which means that consumers could see devices available as soon as 2008.