Interview on bluetooth with Program Director, Mobile Market Development, of IBM
itradionetwork.com.
Ron Sperano
Program Director, Mobile Market Development
IBM
Wednesday, Oct. 18, 2000
The Complete Interview Here (real player listening)
GIVEN: Hey, want to know what’s sexy? Bluetooth is sexy. The ability to interconnect your wireless phone with your address book, that’s stored on your PDA. One gadget talks to all your gadgets, including your appliances. Well, I think it’s the closest thing to magic going. And I’m joined now by Ron Sperano from IBM to tell us how they’re developing their Bluetooth strategy. Ron, welcome to the IT Radio Network.
SPERANO: Glad to be here.
GIVEN: So now Bluetooth is like supercharged radio frequency. What’s the vision of the Bluetooth special interest group and what’s IBM’s Bluetooth vision?
SPERANO: Well, Bluetooth is for personal connectivity. It’s for connecting to an array of devices that would be in what we call your personal domain. Your PC, your peripherals, if you had a camera, a cell phone, a PDA. Things like this. Things that you might find in your office. It is a low range up to about ten meters, low power and the bandwidth is about 720 kilobits per second. So it’s not designed as the panacea for wireless communication. It is very focused. It is focused on this personal connectivity and the vision is when you walk into your personal domain, your office, you are connected to your peripherals automatically, or if you come into contact with someone else and you want to share information, share files, share phone numbers, things like that, you can do that through a very quick and easy Bluetooth connection. So think of Bluetooth as a way of solving what we call the last ten feet in your office. Getting rid of the spaghetti mess of cables that you have there. That’s what Bluetooth is all about.
GIVEN: Now, obviously Bluetooth items have to be on a different frequency as other standard RF items like a garage door opener, stuff like that. So is it similar to bands on a walkie-talkie? How does all that work?
SPERANO: The way it works, Bluetooth functions in what’s called the ISM of the wireless spectrum. It’s the industry scientific medical band and it operates at 2.4 gigaherz and oddly enough, your microwave is also at that band. The way it works is Bluetooth uses something that’s called frequency hopping. In order to reduce the power required and to reduce the amount of interference, because that band – these are unlicensed bands, so anyone can build a radio in this band. So in order to reduce the amount of interference, Bluetooth uses something called frequency hopping. In fact, it was a protocol designed to be used in the military during the war to prevent the enemy from listening in on communications. And what happens is Bluetooth will hop to a different frequency within that band, within that 2.4 gigaherz band. There’s something like 79 different frequencies. And it will hop 1600 times per second. So every second it’s hopping to a different frequency. So if it hops to a frequency that your garage door opener or that your microwave is on – and by the way, you have to be close proximity in order to even see that interference – Bluetooth will simply hop to a different frequency.
One that is not being used. So clearly there is potential for interference, but the technology is robust enough to get around it, if you will. And there’s enough error control built in that if it has to re-transmit, it certainly will. We are not expecting consumers calling in complaining that their garage door is opening as they connect their PDA to their Thinkpad over Bluetooth because of the interference. We don’t think things like that are going to happen.
GIVEN: You’ve been even quoted as saying that Bluetooth is the holy grail of compatibility. What do you mean by that?
SPERANO: Actually I believe the holy grail of connectivity. And what I believe by that is if you look on the back of a Thinkpad or other devices, you’ll see a number of ports. Maybe up to 11 different ports back there, and they all take a different connector – serial, parallel, floppy, audio. All take a different type of connector, and in order to connect to something specifically, you need that very specific cable. Bluetooth has the promise to do away with a lot of those ports. Maybe 5 to 7 of them. So instead of having a parallel port where you have to connect a cable, I can actually connect to a Bluetooth enabled printer over the air waves and if I go down to my buddy’s office or maybe to a public printer that’s in the hallway here, I can just print it out without having to physically connect the cable. So instead of trying to line up physical connections that by definition are going to be different, Bluetooth allows – gives the potential to shield that complexity from the user. There’s no physical connection you have to line up. It’s strictly a radio wave and all I have to do is be within 10 feet and I can communicate. Now we’re not there yet, but I mean all these devices have to be Bluetooth enabled. But it has that potential to have universal connectivity.
GIVEN: All right. Let me give you a hypothetical, Ron. I’m in my office and I’m accessing the printer via my Bluetooth, and my colleague, Al, comes in and he’s accessing something via his Bluetooth. What are the chances of a cross-con-necting mishap of the signals being crossed over from one Bluetooth enabled to another?
SPERANO: Right. Well, as I mentioned, the devices do what’s called frequency hopping and when I’m talking to my device, my Thinkpad to my printer, I am on a specific hopping pattern that my printer sets up unbeknownst to me. It’s transparent to the user. But it sets up that hopping pattern. When someone else comes in and wants to connect, he can do that since it’s my printer. He would have to ask me permission to do that because my printer wouldn’t be set up as a public printer, and frankly, the way he’ll do that is he’ll probably go through me, through my system. I would give him permission to do that and then his system would actually start a different hopping pattern so they would hop to different frequencies at different times.
And once again, if they do go to the same frequency, the technology is robust to know to back off and try something else and do someerror correction. So in all the testing we’ve done, we really don’t see any problem there. I can be talking to a Bluetooth device, someone can be coming in and he wants to talk to me with his Bluetooth device. That’s precisely what the technology is designed to do and the capability to do it is designed into the protocol.
GIVEN: Now the B-to-C applications for Bluetooth are fairly apparent. But everyone knows that the real money is in the B-to-B space. So how can IBM’s enterprise clients use the technology in a business-to-business application?
SPERANO: Well, the Bluetooth technology is really addresses the connectivity – the personal connectivity problem. All the cables that are in your office. I’m not so sure it really addresses the B to B, only to the extent that no matter what you’re doing, B-to-C, B to B, there’s going to be a person involved and you have to get to that individual somehow. And what Bluetooth allows you to do is over a wireless connection get to that individual. But it is really designed for personal connectivity. And not much more than that.
So I don’t think it’s going to have a huge impact on B to B. When you’re talking B to B, you’re talking large networks; large data pipes and a great deal of security to make sure that the systems are in fact secure. Bluetooth has security built in. There’s certainly encryption there, but to the extent that any B-to-B has to get to an individual, Bluetooth can facilitate that by reducing the amount of wires.
GIVEN: Ron, thank you so much for joining us today.
SPERANO: No problem.
GIVEN: That was Ron Sperano, Program Director, Mobile Market Development, for IBM Personal Systems Group. For the IT Radio Network, this is Ann Given. |
