"Bluetooth Next Big Thing"
telegraph.co.uk
(under the link there are other links and stuff to be found.
Yes those british feel very consensus over this Bluetooth hype, and why not, this serves as major extension to internet and Old Country has large IP in play.)
All
Bluetooth smiles on a life without
Bluetooth Special Interest Group
Bluetooth - Ericsson
Bluetooth technologies - Lucent microelectronics
Bluetooth products and BlueCore solutions - Cambridge Silicon Radio
Psion
Bluetooth platform IP - Arm Holdings
Widcomm
Parthus
Frost & Sullivan
Chris Nuttall reports on the chip which will kiss flexes, cables and leads goodbye forever
BLUETOOTH may sound like a particularly cold dental surgery but it is in fact the Next Big Thing, a radio technology that promises to revolutionise the electronics and computer industry yet again.
In the next few months Bluetooth will become the hot buzz word in the City. Just as a year ago a dotcom or a dotnet after a company name ensured that its shares would shoot into orbit, by the end of the year all that company bosses or their backers will have to do is murmur the word Bluetooth to start investors drooling.
Fed up with the sheaves of cables that connect all your electrical and computer appliances? The ones that tangle round your legs and knock over your coffee cups? Well, Bluetooth promises to sweep them all away. Instead of communicating by cable, computers will be linked to their peripherals by tiny, local area radios.
It sounds simple but the new technology is set to make billions for the biggest-ever consortium of businesses formed to exploit an industry standard.Every manufacturing sector from mobile phones to aircraft is expected to benefit from Bluetooth as the technology moves into mass production this autumn. Bluetooth's designers at Ericsson named the new standard after the 10th century Danish king whose communication skills managed to link Norway and Denmark as one kingdom.
"We were looking at radio technology to link devices instead of cables or infra-red, which needs a direct line-of-sight" says Colin Ellis, Ericsson's senior product manager in the UK. "We could develop PC cards to link laptops to mobile phones using Bluetooth or make wireless headsets for the phones. But we wanted it to be available to the whole world so it could work with all devices. If we'd kept it to ourselves, we could have picked over a small market of, say, 5m Ericsson users rather than the potential 5bn users out there."
A Bluetooth special interest group (SIG) was formed in 1998, initially consisting of wireless and computer companies, but then rapidly expanding to cover all manner of industries. At the last count, the SIG included almost 2,000 companies, all of which share the technology.
Greg Ellard, European director of applications in Lucent Technologies' microelectronics group says: "The great thing has been the co-operation. People saw the huge volumes possible with the ubiquitous take-up of Bluetooth. None of us feel we are losing anything in handing over the intellectual property on this. It's a better business proposition as we will gain back tenfold in volume."
Bluetooth's advantages are its abilities to get devices of any kind talking to one another within a range of 10 to 100 metres. Very low-powered radio signals are used - satisying safety concerns - and data can be exchanged at speeds similar to office cable networks.
Manufacturers are only just beginning to tap the potential. Ericsson is likely to launch the first Bluetooth product - a wireless headset for use with its phones - by the end of September. Existing devices can be upgraded to Bluetooth with the initial range of products - PC cards to insert in slots in laptop computers and new batteries with embedded Bluetooth chips that can clip to normal mobile phones. The first phone with Bluetooth built-in, the Ericsson T36, should be available by the end of the year.
Beyond that, uses are only limited by people's imaginations, according to Colin Ellis: "Boeing is a member of the SIG. Imagine how much weight cables take up in planes and the savings that could be made with Bluetooth."
The automotive industry is particularly interested in Bluetooth. "We know of five major manufacturers worldwide who want to embed this in the electronics of their cars," says Alan Woolhouse of the British Bluetooth chip firm Cambridge Silicon Radio. CSR is one of the technology companies expected to win big orders when Bluetooth takes off.
The company has managed to fit a Bluetooth transmitter and receiver onto a single silicon wafer and enable mass production that will drive prices down and increase the volume of products available. "Chips available at the moment cost $35 to $37, but our price target is $5," says Woolhouse. "We will begin shipping next month hundreds of thousands in the $7 to $8 price range, making us first to market. We're being very aggressive; our aim is to enable the market by providing this single chip for our customers to develop applications on."
Mike Wall, Bluetooth analyst at the Frost & Sullivan marketing consultancy, says: "CSR are the big boys at the moment - everyone else is chasing them and they have a nine to 12 months' lead. By pursuing this low-cost strategy, they can take a large market share and the profits can come later. It will be a year or two before they start reaping the benefits."
Lucent is a much larger competitor to CSR but is following a similar strategy: Greg Ellard says: "We will be shipping silicon die and Bluetooth modules in the hundreds of thousands a month in the next couple of months. You can imagine Bluetooth in everything - consumer appliances, wireless joysticks for games consoles, in cars and in the office where it will give you instant access to printers and email as soon as you walk in with your device."
Interoperability - making sure manufacturers' products work with their rivals' - has been a nagging problem. But "unplugged fests", where Bluetooth SIG members meet behind closed doors to test their communications links, have ironed out many of the bugs surrounding the standard.
Apart from CSR, other British companies set to benefit early on from their Bluetooth expertise are Psion and Arm Holdings. Psion will supply the technology to Compaq and Dell and has bought a 3.2 per cent stake in Widcomm, a US firm expert in developing software for the chips. Arm has seen major manufacturers such as Ericsson license its processor core for their Bluetooth products. It has also taken a $2m equity stake in an Irish company, Parthus, which develops Bluetooth applications.
If all goes well, Bluetooth revenues will mushroom from $92m in 1999 to $53bn by 2006, according to Frost & Sullivan. "We are talking billions of units in the next five years," says Mike Wall. "There's a lot of hype about it at the moment and people have to be careful they don't sail off into the realms of science fiction. But if they can get the products out at the right price then there is a huge market."
9 July 2000: Cambridge Silicon Radio |
