Consortium building wireless momentum

Mobile computing is expected to get easier in the next couple of years thanks to more than 200 vendors backing Bluetooth, a new wireless technology.

Bluetooth is designed to let users connect multiple types of devices, such as laptop computers, mobile phones and printers, without the use of cables. Its backers call Bluetooth a draft specification, though it has not been submitted to any formal standards body.

The technology will let users receive e-mail on wireless handsets or send a document to a printer over the unlicensed wireless Industrial, Science and Medical frequency band. Bluetooth is limited to transmissions within 30 meters.

Late last month, the Bluetooth Special Interest Group (SIG), founded in May by Ericsson, IBM, Intel, Nokia and Toshiba, held its first developers conference in Atlanta.

Vendors demonstrated PC-to-PC file transfers at 500K bit/sec using the draft specification, says Simon Ellis, marketing manager for Intel's mobile and handheld products group.

At the conference, the Bluetooth SIG announced that 3Com, Hewlett-Packard, Lucent, Motorola, Philips, Samsung, Texas Instruments, Xircom and other companies are now part of the SIG and are interested in developing products based on the Bluetooth technology.

The Bluetooth 1.0 specification is expected to be complete by mid-1999, with products following by early 2000, Ellis says.

Bluetooth technology is expected to give users more flexibility when they are on the road via low-cost devices. For example, Bluetooth technology is only expected to add $20 to the total cost of any device, says Skip Bryan, director of technical marketing at Ericsson. Today the technology is based on a dual chipset, but plans are in the works to integrate Bluetooth onto a single chip, which will reduce add-on costs to $5, Bryan says.

Because the technology is using an unlicensed wireless band, users will not have to worry about monthly service bills.

One of the goals of Bluetooth is to bring together a collection of devices that can communicate with each other regardless of vendor or product type. That mission explains how the technology got its name, Bryan says. Harold Bluetooth was a 10th century Danish king who united Denmark, Southern Norway and Southern Sweden, and brought Christianity to those territories, he explains. In the technology's case, the vendors represent the countries, and the specification represents Christianity.

Using Bluetooth, not only should users expect new capabilities in their current mobile devices, but new products are also in the works.

Imagine traveling to one of your company's branch sites and connecting to the Internet without searching for an RJ-11 telephone jack that's not connected to a PBX.

Companies are developing access nodes that will let users who have a Bluetooth port on their laptops connect to a device similar to the base station for a 900-MHz telephone, says Joe Doria, worldwide product manager for Think Pad systems at IBM. The access node would be found on a LAN in sites near spare office space or in a conference room, Doria explains.

More information on the Bluetooth SIG is available at www.bluetooth.com.