Bluetooth roadmap could enhance cellular revenue: complexity, other shortcomings limit technology's potential

America's Network, Dec 1, 2004 by Robert Poe

Even though Bluetooth is more a revenue enhancer than a revenue source for service providers, that doesn't mean they can ignore the advances and stumbles of the short-range wireless technology. Its successes or failures could have significant impact on cellular operators' business in particular. The announcement by the Bluetooth special interest group (SIG) of a three-year technology roadmap addressed the question of advances. It's not clear, however, that it did the same for the stumbles.

Cellular handsets are the most popular Bluetooth application so far. They are big sellers in Europe and Asia, and making headway in the U.S. With chipsets costing as little as three dollars and total implementation costs perhaps twice that, Bluetooth phones can operate via wireless headsets or even Bluetooth-equipped car radios. That helps dedicated talkers cram in even more monthly minutes than they could if they had to hold phones to heads the whole time. It also, of course, boosts operator revenues.

Anders Edlund, marketing director for the Bluetooth SIG, notes another way Bluetooth could dramatically boost service providers' revenues: by wirelessly connecting laptops to 3G cellular phones to provide high-speed Internet access, eliminating the need to look for hotspots the way Wi-Fi requires.

RISING SALES

Cellular use will help boost worldwide sales to 146 million Bluetooth chipsets this year, according to Joyce Putscher, director and principal analyst at In-Stat/MDR. The U.S. lags in cellular applications because of a dearth of Bluetooth-embedded CDMA phones and lack of support from mobile operators. Automotive, notebook computer, other headset (such as for music) and PDA applications are significant sources of non-cellular demand, she adds.

Some of these applications will benefit significantly from the new roadmap. For example, advances for the first year, which is 2004, include an enhanced data rate (EDR) of 3 Mbps, up from 1 Mbps. This will make possible either higher-quality music streaming, shorter file transfer times, or a greater number of simultaneous connections. Other advances during the three years will include decreased power consumption, enhanced quality of service differentiation, better security, an increase in the number of "slave" devices that can connect to a single "master" device, and the multicasting capabilities.

All well and good, but this doesn't solve the fundamental problem most observers agree hinders Bluetooth's broadening into wider markets: its technological complexity for users.

"People spend hours trying to get it to work," says Gartner analyst Ken Dulaney. Even the apparently simplest application, connecting a cellular phone and a wireless headset, contains potential stumbling blocks. One is that it's necessary to set up, or "pair," the two specific devices to work with one another. That usually requires a trip to the owners manual, and putting in a PIN, at the minimum. Making it particularly frustrating is that there's no standardized user interface, so such procedures will vary from device to device. And that's due in part to an excess of vendor individuality. "Vendors pride themselves on differentiation. But what they've failed to do is provide some consistency on the user interface experience between any two devices," says Dulaney.

Even wading through the various manuals might not get the devices to work together. "Manufacturers may test their products against several of the most popular devices," says Todd Kort, another Gartner analyst. "But that doesn't guarantee there is complete interoperability the way there is with, say, Wi-Fi. It's a fault on the part of some vendors for implementing less than fully compliant profiles."

But it's also a fault of the standards process, according to Dulaney. "It's OK to have a standard, but it doesn't mean much until you have a third-party interoperability testing group that stands behind it." Rather than the sort of rigorous approach Wi-Fi uses, Bluetooth relies on a less comprehensive "plugfest" approach, he notes.

The profiles themselves complicate the interoperability issue. Their technological goal is admirable: they serve as sort of add-ons to the basic Bluetooth spec, to allow additional devices to connect and work together as they are developed.

But for a camera phone, say, to communicate with another device, both devices have to have the camera phone profile embedded. That means vendors have to envision, and implement, all the uses their products might someday see. Printer makers, for example, would have had to judge early on that people might want to directly print digital photos they've taken with their camera phones. Likewise for applications like playing MP3 music devices through a car sound system. Otherwise, consumers buying two Bluetooth-enabled products expecting them to work together may be disappointed.

SECURITY HOLES

Yet another problem is, to put it bluntly, engineering incompetence. And that can cause problems even more serious than inconvenience, notes Peter Firstbrook, a Meta Group program director. "There are three or four security holes in Bluetooth devices now, and almost all of them are due to implementation, not the spec," he says.