No blues for Bluetooth: it powers the wireless growth engine - Industry Overview

Computer Technology Review, July, 2002 by Joshua Piven

It's certainly no secret that the world is going wireless. The wireless revolution, like the Internet revolution of the last decade, is universally considered to be a good thing. It enables freedom of movement, it connects remote areas where stringing wires cannot be economically achieved, and it brings users vast amounts of information and new services.

Perhaps no technology better illustrates this momentum than Bluetooth, which--after years in development--is finally putting cell phones and other mobile devices in ad-hoc personal area networks (PANs), allowing them to connect to one another and to the Internet. A recent study by market research firm InStat/MDR reports that, despite delays of some very large, planned 2001 chipset shipments from December to the first quarter of the year, shipments of Bluetooth chipsets will climb into the hundreds of millions of units in as little as four years.

But two other reports illustrate some unintended consequences of wireless, and the news is distressing: Mobile devices are increasingly creating large amounts of dangerous waste, and the cumulative radiation they release may be cause for alarm.

No Blues for Bluetooth

Bluetooth is on a roll, and all current indications are that it will be a successful competitor in the wireless space. The InStat/MDR report says that chipsets will surge from 10.4 million units in 2001 to 690 million units in 2006. This represents a five-year, 132% compound annual growth rate, with silicon revenue rising to $2.7 billion in 2006. Bluetooth-enabled equipment will climb to 644 million units over the same period and cars with Bluetooth chipsets will begin arriving next year.

The Bluetooth Special Interest Group (SIG), which develops Bluetooth standards, is now concentrating on expanding the types of products that the technology supports. Mike McCamon, executive director of the Bluetooth SIG, believes that, right now, the critical thing is making a stable platform that allows all new products to work together seamlessly. "Japan has consumer products (camcorders, notebooks, PDAs); Europe has cell phones and headsets; and the U.S. has PC-centric devices. All of these can work together [using the Bluetooth standard], which is pretty incredible."

In order to expand the types of devices that use Bluetooth, getting a faster spec is a consideration. "With more products becoming available on the market, the next hurdles are to bring more user applications and high-rate Bluetooth to market," said Joyce Putscher, director of InStat/MDR's Converging Markets and Technologies Group.

McCamon indicates that work is progressing in several SIG working groups to create new profiles that adapt the specification to new markets, including imaging, audio and video, and high-speed file transfer. In particular, the high-rate radio group is working on a faster Bluetooth radio that, it now seems likely, will make its appearance sometime late this or early next year in Bluetooth 2.0.

"The SIG has been shooting for about 12Mbps with 10Mbps throughput," said InStat's Putscher. "In my estimation, assuming that the specification is passed this year, we could see the beginnings of products by 2H2003, but primarily in 2004."

The Wages of Wireless

If we only listened to industry analysts and special interest groups, of course, we would be hard-pressed to find negative news about wireless technology whatsoever. Analysts outside of the computer industry, however, see some dark clouds among the silver linings.

"Waste in the Wireless World: The Challenge of Cell Phones," a provocative new study released by the national environmental research organization INFORM, says that the wireless boom is producing more than just cool new products. It is also creating increasing amounts of dangerous waste, and the study sees the problem getting much worse over the next several years.

The report says that the average cell phone is typically used for 18 months before being replaced; by 2005 about 130 million phones will be retired annually in the U.S. "There has been lots of research on the waste created by PCs, but not by cell phones, and with so many functions now shifting to phones, we felt this was important research," said Bette Fishbein, INFORM Senior Fellow and the report's author. "But the growth in their use has been so enormous that the environmental and public health impacts of the waste they create are a significant concern. We are also hearing about disposable cell phones, so now is the time to address these issues."

According to the Cellular Telecommunications and Internet Association, a phone industry trade group, there are currently about 129 million cell phone subscribers in the U.S (in 1998 there were 70 million). According to the INFORM report, by 2005 there will be about 200 million cell phones in use in this country, and that at that time there will be a stockpile of 500 million cell phones that have been "retired" and are ready to enter the nation's waste stream.

According to the report, toxic substances contained in cell phones include a number of persistent and bioaccumulative toxic chemicals (PBTs), which have been associated with cancer and reproductive, neurological, and developmental disorders. (PBTs pose a particular threat to children, whose developing organ and immune systems are highly susceptible to toxins.) PBTs in cell phones include arsenic, antimony, beryllium, cadmium, copper, lead, nickel, and zinc. Additional health threats, according to Fishbein, are posed by brominated flame retardants used in plastic components. These toxics can leach into soil and groundwater from landfills and form highly toxic dioxins and furans during incineration and recycling.