Bluetooth “Partnerships” Will Make it a Connectivity Swiss Army Knife
Two clever enhancements now in development will allow the ubiquitous – but slow – Bluetooth wireless technology to handle much larger amounts of data at much higher speeds. This will significantly increase Bluetooth’s usefulness, making it a kind of multi-purpose “Swiss Army Knife” among protocols, and entrenching its already strong position in portable electronics.
“The Bluetooth SIG has announced work on what they call an alternate MAC PHY – ‘AMP’ – which will be a combination of Bluetooth and Wi-Fi,” says ABI Research senior analyst Douglas McEuen. “It will be a software upgrade for devices equipped with both Bluetooth and Wi-Fi chips, allowing Bluetooth to utilize Wi-Fi when larger files must be transmitted. Once that transfer is complete, it will fall back to standard Bluetooth.”
The long term goal in the critical cellular market is to enable Bluetooth to work with ultra-wideband (UWB) as an integrated solution, for an even faster transfer of larger files. That would open the possibility of the Bluetooth platform as a video connectivity solution.
“The SIG is trying to position Bluetooth as a kind of catch-all platform that can do everything,” adds McEuen.” Classic Bluetooth will take care of your voice applications. AMP Bluetooth will allow you that extra kick when you need it. And further down the road, high-speed Bluetooth with UWB will offer huge data rates.”
Some first products incorporating the AMP-enhanced Bluetooth may be in the market early next year. For UWB, a more likely time frame is the end of 2009 or early 2010 for the very first sample products. Portable media devices will probably be the first sweet spot, since these are devices that are using “classic” Bluetooth already. [ABI Research]
As the Bluetooth SIG Announces its Use of 802.11, Questions Loom About Ultra-Wideband’s Future
Members of the Bluetooth SIG (Special Interest Group) announced the development of Bluetooth over 802.11, giving Bluetooth a boost in data rate transfer and helping to quench consumer demand for added speed. Consequently, the UWB (Ultra-Wideband) market worries that this announcement may slow down or even suspend its relationship with Bluetooth; but ABI Research does not believe this will be the case.
Michael Foley, executive director of the Bluetooth SIG, stated, “We’re taking classic Bluetooth connections – using Bluetooth protocols, profiles, security, and other architectural elements – and allowing it to jump on top of the already present 802.11 radio, when necessary, to send bulky entertainment data, faster. When the speed of 802.11 is overkill, the connection returns to normal operation on a Bluetooth radio for optimal power management and performance.”
So where does this leave UWB?
“The Bluetooth SIG’s announcement will not have an impact on the timing of the UWB market,” says ABI Research senior analyst Douglas McEuen, “as UWB remains set to be delivered as a viable radio to wireless handsets during the 2009/2010 time frame.”
Moreover, the utilization of 802.11 is meant to fill a short-term role to the extent that UWB is being developed further, with UWB expected to be quite common in the future. Additionally, a combined Bluetooth/UWB WiMedia radio effectively opens the door to companies such as Alereon, Wisair, and WiQuest for entry into the Bluetooth market.
The inclusion of 802.11 inside the realm of Bluetooth can only attract more consumers, thereby setting the stage for UWB’s implementation to attain its full potential in the coming years. [ABI Research]
Ultra-Wideband Equipment Shipments Will Exceed 400 Million in 2013
In 2006 it appeared that the market launch of Ultra-Wideband (UWB) was imminent. Several factors conspired to delay that, but ABI Research now expects UWB to see very strong growth starting in 2008, finding its first success in laptops and computer peripherals, and eventually in mobile handsets. Forecasts indicate that shipments of UWB-enabled devices will grow from virtually nil today, to more than 400 million in 2013.
“The ultra-wideband market did not come out of the starting gates in 2006 as we had anticipated,” says senior analyst Douglas McEuen. “There were several reasons for the delay, including a shakeout from three competing flavors of the technology to one, and the absence of global standards.”
Now, however, conditions are ripe for a rapid takeoff. We are starting from “Year Zero”: in 2007, only about 40,000 UWB-equipped devices shipped. This year, there will be perhaps a million, and ABI Research expects the curve to rise sharply thereafter. Because an official UWB standard has now been ratified in the United States, North America is expected to lead this market for some time to come.
The current “sweet spot” in this market is UWB’s application as a wireless USB enabler, connecting computers (especially notebooks) with printers, hard drives, and other peripherals. An initial UWB “hub and dongle” configuration will enable users to retrofit the vast number of existing PCs and related equipment with wireless connections. UWB modules are just starting to appear in selected laptops (initially from Lenovo, Dell and Toshiba), but true silicon integration will take more time.
Later, other kinds of consumer electronics such as digital cameras and camcorders, HDTVs, and portable music devices will start to build the numbers, but, says McEuen, “Real market acceleration will only occur when UWB debuts in mobile handsets, where it will be used – possibly bundled with Bluetooth – to transfer music, pictures and video files. Even a small handset market penetration will deliver huge numbers. For UWB to see wide adoption in handsets, however, the price of the chipset must fall quite significantly.” [ABI Research]
SK Telecom, Staccato Deploy Ultra Wideband WPAN Mobile Phone Services
Staccato Communications and SK Telecom, the largest mobile phone and broadband operator in Korea, today unveiled plans for the global delivery of Ultra Wideband (UWB) wireless personal area network (WPAN) mobile phone services. The adoption of UWB by one of the largest and most innovative mobile carriers today will result in a host of new mobile handset applications.
SK Telecom selected Staccato for the company’s leadership in UWB silicon and for the competitive advantages inherent in the company’s Ripcord™ single-chip, all CMOS-based family of solutions. As a result of this partnership, customers, for the first time, will be provided with increased choices for content delivery from access points, connecting mobile phones to larger displays (PC, TV, Auto), connecting mobile phones to the PC ecosystem, and sharing profiles and content from one user to another through personal area social networking (PASN).
Services developed and launched by SK Telecom and Staccato will be standardized and offered worldwide to other operators after initial launch in Korea. With this introduction of UWB WPAN mobile phone services, customers will have expanded options and bandwidth for entertainment content delivery to their mobile devices. This means that users will now experience mobile social networking by communicating directly with other mobile users or from kiosks at 480Mbps. As a result, individuals will be able to connect based on one another’s proximity. This milestone marks the beginning of a revolution in the mobile handset market by employing WiMedia ultra wideband technology for 480Mbps WPAN connections.
With the choice of the WiMedia Common Radio Platform as the foundation for the project, SK Telecom and Staccato are developing together applications using several protocols. This benefit is enabled by Staccato’s PIK MAC (Medium Access Control) technology, which is a Protocol Independent Kernel, based on a custom implementation of hardware acceleration and ARM9 software control. This patent-pending technology enables the simultaneous operation of Certified Wireless USB, WiNet, Bluetooth 3.0 and other potential protocols at speeds up to 480Mbps. Products will initially launch with WiMedia radios using spectrum below 6GHz (band group 1, band 3) and add above-6GHz operation when the WiMedia Alliance completes the certification process for these bands.
“The SK Telecom–Staccato announcement is significant for at least three reasons. First, it signals adoption of UWB in mobile handsets much sooner than anyone had anticipated. Second, it shatters the assumption that a mobile carrier is not willing to use UWB products operating below 6GHz. Lastly, but perhaps most importantly, the value of the UWB applications and services envisioned by SK Telecom looks like it could be very high and very beneficial to both the users and the carriers,” said Fiona Thomson, market analyst, IMS Research.
“SK Telecom is known as the most innovative and aggressive mobile operator in the world due to our history of not only bringing new mobile features to market before our competitors, but also defining such new features that other operators quickly adopt. Staccato is instrumental in furthering this vision by offering the solution that meets our requirements of price, high bandwidth and low power. In order to successfully deploy these mobile devices, we needed a solution based on single-chip CMOS. Staccato is the only company that has accomplished that product design with their Ripcord low-cost, small form-factor wireless solutions,” said Dr. Jong Tae Ihm, vice president and head of the Mobile Device & Access Network R&D Center for SK Telecom.
“From the beginning, Staccato knew that single-chip CMOS was the only viable option to achieve the cost, power and space profile required by handheld products like cell phones, and this endorsement from a major mobile carrier further validates our early path and Ripcord device family. As one of the architects behind the WiMedia PHY and MAC, WiNet and Certified Wireless USB specifications, SK Telecom recognizes that we have the relevant UWB leadership expertise to offer,” said Marty Colombatto, chairman and CEO for Staccato Communications.
“With the mobile handset market representing nearly one billion units worldwide annually, the decision of SK Telecom to adopt the WiMedia Common Radio Platform means a tremendous boost to the potential market for WiMedia applications and Staccato in particular. The impact of this will not remain limited to one application, but will bring an entire array of new features and applications to the mobile customer.”
For the first phase, a Korean-based, leading manufacturer of handsets worldwide will be the handset developer for the new WiMedia UWB handsets.
Source: ABI Research
2016: The end of the mobile as we know it?
How the personal hub could kill the radio star...
By Jo Best
According to HP, the future of cell phones won't be cellular. The devices will do without 3G, 2G - any other kind of G, in fact - and they won't be packing WiMax or wi-fi either.
Instead, HP predicts, the mobile will become just one of a number of gadgets in your personal area network that will get its connectivity via your watch, or a magic box in your pocket, probably using Ultrawideband (UWB) wireless technology.
Phil McKinney, CTO of HP's personal systems group, predicts that in future hardware manufacturers will stop cramming devices with all manner of radios.
Stripping out the connectivity will boost the rate at which consumers update their gadgets. Instead they will have all the gadgets connect by UWB to one stand-alone radio-stuffed hub device, which will then provide whichever type of wireless communications the other gadgets need.
McKinney said: "A year ago I sat down with a team in HP and said what will the future be like? More powerful, more memory, more radios... It will get complex for the users, insanely complex to design."
The team came up with the idea of ditching the radios inside the devices. Currently digital gadgets such as mobile phones, laptops and digital cameras can contain many different radios for their communication needs.
HP's idea is to take the radios that would have previously sat inside each device and house them instead in a 'personal hub', which the users will carry with them every day.
The personal hub will be able to detect the appropriate wireless for each device and hand over between them if needs be.
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