Comment Articles

Bluetooth's bark still bigger than bite

Guy Kewney AnchorDesk

Published: 02 Dec 1999 17:53 GMT

This week's good news is that Microsoft has joined the Special Interest Group, together with Motorola and Toshiba, and modem chip makers 3Com and Lucent. This means that we will, almost certainly, have working wireless headsets for our phones by mid-summer 2000. Does it mean much else?

Well, not yet, it doesn't. I'm at least as enthusiastic about having a wireless link from my phone to my headset as Ericsson is (they showed a prototype at Comdex) but really, the only advantage of the system is that you don't have to trip over the cable. There is nothing that Bluetooth brings to the party in its current design state, and there is a price to pay, because a copper wire can take power to a device. Bluetooth needs a battery to work.

The reason I'm urging caution is because I've been reading a lot of unjustifiable hysteria about how wonderful Bluetooth will be. It will (said one commentator) make it possible to plug your phone into the LAN. Wrong, unless you already have a phone capable of plugging into the LAN. Another said it will make it possible to carry your notebook from office to office, without losing the network connection. Wrong, it won't, not unless and until someone designs a protocol to do that.

There are "roaming" wireless technologies around which allow you to set up a series of cells, just as you do with GSM phones. There is a protocol built into these technologies which says that as you drop out of range of one cell, the system searches to see which cell you are moving into, and transfers you to that. There is no such protocol in Bluetooth.

Of course, there's nothing to stop you putting Bluetooth devices onto an office network, and programming the network to look for mobile devices. But the system you use will be written by you, and it won't work on anybody else's Bluetooth devices, unless you've told them how to make it work. Bluetooth devices effectively plug themselves into each other, and stay connected until one or the other switches off the link. That's it.

Of course, this is a huge breakthrough in mobile computing. It really does hold out the promise of just bringing two devices into transceiver range, and watching them swap data, without the nightmare of getting infra-red lights to shine directly at each other; and without the confusion of which of them is talking to which.

But not yet.....