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Your advert here!!! Technical Editors:
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What is Bluetooth?
Bluetooth is an established
standard for RF (radio frequency) communications that has managed to break
through a whole range of established boundaries. The origins of Bluetooth stem
from trying to find a successor to the infra-red ports (championed by iRDA)
found in the majority of PDAs and data enabled mobile handsets. Pre-Bluetooth it
was necessary to line a portable computer's infra-red port up with the infra-red
port in a cellular mobile phone in order to achieve a data connection. Once the
link was established, it was then possible to go onto the Internet and download
emails as well as browse Web pages at low speeds. Infra-red or a serial (RS232) cable is both slow and clumsy. Using radio waves rather than infra-red light absolves the need for two communicating devices to be pointed directly at each other. Hence in May 1998 Ericsson, IBM, Intel, Nokia, and Toshiba got together to launch Bluetooth - a standard for radio based wireless connections. It operates in the unlicensed ISM (Industrial Scientific and Medical) band at 2.45 GHz which has previously given us wireless door chimes and automatic garage door openers. The waveband is universally available with minor restrictions in Japan and some parts of Europe (especially France). With Bluetooth it is feasible for
the PDA to be shut inside a briefcase and the communicating handset to be
located inside a jacket pocket. The distance between the two devices (assuming
there's no brick walls in the way) is less than 10 metres (40 feet). Committees
insist on complicating matters, hence in Bluetooth's case the standard has been
amended to allow for a maximum distance of up to 100 metres (400 feet). Bluetooth's chief advantages are
its low power consumption with no line of sight requirement like satellite or
infra-red but is Achilles heel is very definitely its short range compared to
IEEE 802.11 (wireless Internet), for example. There's been talk of 1.8 billion
Bluetooth enabled devices by 2003 but the huge snag is that Bluetooth interface
chips don't yet exist as the US $5 price tag its advocates originally promised.
The first Bluetooth devices to approach something near a mass market have been
Bluetooth enabled GSM handsets. At present the Ericsson R520 is the only handset
with Bluetooth built in. A useful reference site is the
Incisor newsletter (www.click.co.uk/incisor.htm). |
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