BLUETOOTH....need a dentist? Wireless phones: They're
beautiful AND brilliant
By Peter J. Howe, Globe Staff
More than 800 companies are working on a project to build
a wireless telephone that one day will let you:
Forward all your e-mail to the wireless phone.
Use the phone to tell your car stereo to play your calls.
Authorize a gas pump to charge your credit card for a
fillup. It's been a long day and you're thirsty, so you punch
a few more numbers and out from the vending machine
comes a cold Coke - the $1 cost added to your phone bill.
A Global Positioning Satellite link in the phone, which
recognizes that you're taking your usual route home,
warns you of a bad traffic jam a mile ahead. A message on
the screen advises you to take the toll road instead. As
you drive through the toll plaza express lane, the phone
tells the Turnpike Authority to charge the 50 cents to your
account.
As you pull into the driveway, you use the phone to open
your garage door, turn off the burglar alarm, and start a
Frank Sinatra disc spinning on the CD player while New
England Cable News comes up on the TV. You look down
and see your phone is telling you the dishwasher has
finished a load of dishes, and an e-mail order was placed
for heating oil for the furnace that morning because the
tank is down to the last 20 gallons.
What could make this admittedly Jetsonian-sounding
scenario come to pass is a new wireless technology
standard called Bluetooth, named for the 10th-century
Danish King Harald who was known for both his rotten
front tooth and his success uniting warring factions in
Denmark and Norway into a mighty kingdom. (Today's
Bluetooth would unite devices that are only oblivious of
each other, not necessarily hostile.)
Among the companies working to perfect the Bluetooth
standard are wireless phone makers Ericsson and Nokia,
along with fellow founding members IBM, Intel, and
Toshiba. In August, they publicized initial technical
standards for the system, and are offering the technology
free to anyone who will use it - and agree to waive patent
rights for new applications. Microsoft, whose support is
considered crucial to making the system a success, is
also weighing signng up.
The first Bluetooth-equipped products are expected to hit
the market as soon as early next year. By 2002, Philips
Electronics - not a totally impartial source, because it is
developing Bluetooth-equipped products - predicts that 600
million Bluetooth-capable devices could be communicating
with each other around the world.
Rick Onyon, president and chief executive of FusionOne, a
Los Gatos, Calif., company that develops software to
synchronize Internet communications among computers,
telephones, and other devices, says Bluetooth promises to
''dramatically advance the wireless industry.'' Onyon sees
a day when ''up-to-date digital information is available
anytime, anywhere across a myriad of computing devices.''
Andrew Cole, head of the wireless practice with
communications consultants Renaissance Worldwide,
says while a few other similar efforts are underway - Home
Radio Frequency and IRDA-2 are two others - ''Bluetooth is
way ahead, and folks in the industry tend to coalesce
around the leading standard.''
While its applications may sound fantastic, Cole says he
believes Bluetooth is ''very believable and very doable,''
particularly as wireless phone usage in the United States
begins to approach the high levels of Scandinavia and
Europe.
But Mark Lowenstein, a senior wireless analyst with The
Yankee Group in Boston, said Bluetooth's potential is
accompanied by a lot of hype.
''It is not yet economically compelling,'' Lowenstein says,
for product manufacturers to add anywhere from $100 to
$500 to the price of various devices to give them
communications ability. But if Bluetooth can follow the
same price curve as, for example, wireless phones - which
have gone from $3,000 to basically nothing with the right
calling plan - Lowenstein predicts many companies will
jump to get involved as soon as they can.
Bluetooth refers not so much to specific devices as a
system for helping many different things communicate with
each other through low-power, 2.4-gigahertz radio signals
that might reach just 100 feet, but could penetrate
briefcases and house walls.
The market for what are broadly defined as ''smart
phones,'' those that can receive e-mail, surf the Internet,
and do more than just complete calls, is projected by The
Yankee Group in Boston to grow by a factor of 1,000 in the
next three years, from 25,000 units in 1998 to 28.4 million
in 2002. In Europe, where wireless usage rates are much
higher, Yankee's projected growth is from 249,000 in 1998
to 43.4 million in 2002; in Finland today, for example,
Sonera Ltd. customers can buy a soda from specially
equipped vending machines by dialing a special phone
number; the computer tells the machine what to dispense.
While Bluetooth backers are full of fantasies for what might
happen, they acknowledge one of the more exciting
prospects is the sort of pre-Tower-of-Babel scenario. Just
as people who spoke all the same language could build a
tower to heaven, once the machines and devices we use
each day can begin to talk to each other, it's hard to say
whether the sky - or anything else - will be the limit for
what could happen.
Ted Browne, senior product marketing manager for
Ericsson mobile phones in North America, says the dream
is that someday, your wireless phone will be ''something
you can use as your remote control for life.''
Peter J. Howe covers business for the Globe. His e-mail
address is howe@globe.com.
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