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Bluetooth Plans to Triple Bandwidth
stallard writes "Yahoo! news reports that "The Bluetooth Special Interest Group (SIG) Monday is releasing a three-year road map for Bluetooth short-range wireless technology that includes a tripling of bandwidth and the ability to multicast signals to seven other users.""
..But I came out of the article wanting to know more about UWB
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insert sig here,here, and here
Hardly short range. You can increase Bluetooth's range to a full mile, with a simple, inexpensive modification.
Those peski radioes are power hungry ...
I think the point of Bluetooth is that you don't see the wires. ;)
for those who don't know, bluetooth is currently only 10mbps bandwidth. this is about as much as usb 1.0. in other words, not a whole hell of a lot. tripling the bandwidth isn't really a good solution either if you ask me. while 30mbps is faster, it's not nearly enough to over take the up and coming wireless usb or wireless firewire. both of which i believe are going to be UWB based (i.e. 400mbps).
:P
one of the interesting design decisions with bluetooth is that it operates at the exact same hz as a cell phone signal. hence the convergence with cell phones and bluetooth, as it was obviously designed with this purpose in mind. maybe we'll get lucky and cell phones will have 1gb+ memory with built in mp3 player support one day, so i won't have to carry so many different damn devices
- tristan
Talk about aiming low: "signals to seven other users". Of course, as soon was there is a hardcoded limit people will want to exceed it. Why not make it 7 million?! Then you can "podcast". Learn from "640K ought to be enough"
Am I the first to say I'm sick of the Bluetooth Special Interest Group and all its porkbarrel politics?
The Commodore SIG announced plans to make a future announcement of an impending design contest to map the creation of the Commodore 192, which would have triple the capacity of its Commodore 64.
Commodore SIG said there were thousands of programs available for the C-64 that would run unchanged or with a simple recompile on the new machine. C-SIG predicted the machine would easily outperform designs from competitors Heath and Timex.
sigs, as if you care.
... and cellphone seem to be doing the job pretty well already with only 10Mbps. At what point do the bandwidth capabilities of an turbo-charged Bluetooth become redundant with WiFi enabled with ZeroConf networking?
Whoopedy freakin' dooo...
I don't need more bandwidth from my phone to my PDA/laptop, I need more bandwidth from my phone to the tower. When GPRS picks up the snail's pace a bit then maybe we can focus on speeding up Bluetooth.
Or am I the only one who only uses BT for phone-> device communication?
Let's get one thing perfectly clear, I did not vote for George W Bush, and I do not endorse what he does or says.
"
I have nothing Bluetooth, what am I missing out on? Is this like the next best thing behind 802.11? What's the big deal already?
From the article:
The three-year road map will help show that Bluetooth has staying power, Foley said.
Under the road map, the SIG plans to complete the Bluetooth Version 2.0+EDR (Enhanced Data Rate) specification by the end of this year, increasing the data rate to 3Mbit/sec., up from 1Mbit/sec. in the current Version 1.2, Foley said. Products are expected to appear with the EDR as early as June 2005, he said. The newer-version products will also be backward-compatible with older versions.
So it will go from 1 Mbit/sec. to 3Mbit/sec which isn't too bad considering its uses. I mean, really, how much bandwidth does your keyboard and mouse need? Or your cell phone earpiece? I don't think anyone needs to show that Bluetooth has "staying power." It targets a particular market and particular applications and does its job very well. You don't need 1Gbit/sec of bandwidth (which you'll get with UWB) to use your keyboard, mouse, or earpiece.
I think the most interesting thing is the multicasting to seven other devices. That should allow a lot of fun and interesting applications.
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infested with jello like fishes no melotron wishes
that includes a tripling of bandwidth and the ability to multicast signals to seven
So now I can hack seven phones or PDAs at once, and do it 3 times faster.
Does that mean trippling of the range??? I'd sure appreciate a fetaure like that... Here're some bluejacking links. Also, great general bluetooth info on the WebLogsInc.
I think that these latest advances are all bluetooth needs to become a ubiquitous standard like USB.
HA HA HA
I am just kidding.
Sorry, but anyone that needs to be that connected to their mobile phone probably doesn't have a life that contains many people interested in calling them anyway.
S.I.G.
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
Karma be bad. I already have bad Karma, so I figure a first post ins't going to hurt me.
I think Bluetooth is a waste of technology. If you have a short range with limited bandwidth, why not connect using serial cable? I mean, your going to get the same result...waiting.
I think that there are much more robust alternatives. Bluetooth came out with all this hope, but crashed after the time it took to get it going.
If I wrote something witty, you would say I stole it from somewhere.
If you could connect to a handheld based "lan party" using Bluetooth where ever you wanted I would get it!
Dashboard Widgets
Currently Bluetooth is about 721 kbits. EDR will extend it to 2.1Mbits.
tripling the bandwidth isn't really a good solution either if you ask me. while 30mbps is faster, it's not nearly enough to over take the up and coming wireless usb or wireless firewire. both of which i believe are going to be UWB based (i.e. 400mbps).
Tripling the bandwidth would allow lossless transmission to stereo headphones, where currently it's (slightly) compressed. It's a relatively small change in spec too - mostly just a change to the modulation scheme.
UWB will likely have a hard time passing regulations (except in the US), because it's a deliberate radiator over a large chunk of everyone else's spectrum. It's also dubious whether it's actually a low power solution, or better than OFDM (802.11g and friends) when power isn't an issue. It also doesn't exist in a useful commercial form, and probably (in my opinion) never will. Or at least, never should.
one of the interesting design decisions with bluetooth is that it operates at the exact same hz as a cell phone signal. hence the convergence with cell phones and bluetooth, as it was obviously designed with this purpose in mind.
No, it operates at 2.4GHz, like most other consumer digital wireless stuff.
maybe we'll get lucky and cell phones will have 1gb+ memory with built in mp3 player support one day, so i won't have to carry so many different damn devices:P
Because Bluetooth was designed with low power consumption firmly in mind, it's ideal for MP3 players. The transceivers these days are incredibly small. I'm sure you'll see it common place soon.
Has anybody here tried to develop software to run bluetooth hardware? It's enough to make you cry! Has the SIG done anything to try and make developing applications easier?
Hmm.... I see our wireless theater coming one step closer.
;-)
3 times the bandwidth => 3+ stereo signals
I say 3+ because very few people need to broadcast thier music at a full 721kbs.
multicasting => music from seven points in your house or seven speaker systems throughout it.
The makings for a wireless rave
Bluetooth plans to triple bandiwdth
In response to which Lous IV has ruled to triple the CPU speeds!
If the 7-peer multicast limit comes from connecting to other Bluetooth phones as the slaves in a BT piconet, can they each connect to 7 other devices in their own piconets? A P2P (Piconet to Piconet) daisy chain? And will those P2P internets exclude the "peripheral" devices, like headphones and storage, that currently fill the piconets?
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make install -not war
But how are you going to get 7 million people in a volume of 30 feet around you?
Seven is not too bad considering the purpose of bluetooth - short range cheap (as in low energy and cheap chipsetets) device to device communications.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Wikipedia has a good article on UWB
.pdf at Google about An Ultra Wide Bandwidth System for In-Home Wireless Networking has good background on UWB.
Also an interesting cached
Sig cancelled due to lack of interest
Any plans to beef up Bluetooth security, to complement these changes?
Environmentalism is the new Victorianism. Everyone ties on a green corset and pretends we're virtuous.
once again the BT SIG strategy is to try to be everything to everyone and therefore is less and less useful and relevant.
get back to the original pitch: simplify connections
btw, i'm off bluetooth and onto uwb -- check out new uwb blog at http://www.pulsepipe.com/
i realize that all the emerging wireless options (zigbee, 802.11n, uwb, etc.) are best suited to different conbinations of range, power needs, and bandwidth, but are devices really going to support so many different standards? we're just now seeing bluetooth and wifi together. add three more options, and i fear we'll have a mess.
"let me give you this pr0n."
"do you have zigbee2?"
"no. only uwb and 802.11n."
"infrared?"
"are you kidding?"
[sigh] "just email it to me..."
..as advertised. Especially Nokia seems to be unable to implement bluetooth correctly, and I'm only lucky if I manage to connect my computer to a nokia phone with bluetooth. I've used 3Com-adapters, Socket-adapters and now even the logitech wireless desktop MX with bluetooth (works great btw!) but talk to my nokia? No sorry, that doesn't really work. Bluetooth is great in theory but the interoperability-issues are far too great.
Harald
I mean, the main use for Bluetooth is 'toothing. Personally I would consider seven million people somewhat above the enjoyable limit... ;-)
It needs the extra bandwidth for uncomrpessed audio, though. In addition to just better sounding audio, you'll get more battery runtime from bluetooth headphone setups that don't have to recompress an analog audio signal.
For home-based audio, what's wrong with 802.11?
Well, because then you have to use a cable. And you have to carry said cable with you any time you may want to use it. And you have to juggle devices around to connect said cable.
With bluetooth devices, there is no extra junk to carry around, and no fooling around hooking up cables (or trying to align IR ports if you're thinking of that).
...but I hope they rename the old version to sound faster than the new version so people who have 1st-gen BT gear don't feel sad. Just like DVDs--widescreen, fullscreen... wow, they both sound great!
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
Great, looks like we can now have multiway "Toothing", think of how many more interesting diseases I'll be able to pick up! Sexual deviancy has never been so easy. ;-)
For those of you that don't know what toothing is (Shame on you!), here are some links:
Forget dogging, here comes toothing
'Toothing' for Hi-Tech Sex with Strangers
Biting into the new sex text craze
People that believe in their opinions don't post AC.
Bluetooth is great for location based applications, too. I expect the older style USB bluetooth dongles would become far cheaper in the future, and almost disposable -- like the smaller USB flash drives -- enough to just give them away. A side effect, is that now you have unique MACs which you can use for discovering your location. Of course, this all depends on wardrivers.
Zhrodague.net - I do projects and stuff too.
Bluetooth is a nightmare which requires too much power and code to operate. ZigBee and Wireless USB will kill it in a couple years.
Bluetooth is a big zero. USB flash drives have had a bigger impact on my life than bluetooth.
Does this mean I will get triple the toothing nookie?
I am glad to see Bluetooth development continues. It seems like a technology that was released just a little before its time.
I have written before on my desire to see a true PAN (Personal Area Network), and there does seem to be some work being done on this idea.
Instead of going to all-in-one units (the PDA/phone/camera/game machine Slashdot users like to rant against), why not have individual pieces that work together seamlessly?
Imagine a phone being broken into three pieces - a headset (similar to the Bluetooth ones you are seeing now), the actual phone receiver (for interacting with your provider) that is nothing more than a small matchbook sized piece without any UI, and then a full PDA to contain addresses and phone numbers. Want to call someone? Grab your PDA and hit a phone number. it uses the PAN to tell the phone what to dial, which then uses the PAN to interact with the headset.
Do not want to carry the PDA that day? Fine, leave it at home. It is always synced with the phone device, which can be controlled using your voice (voice dialing).
Taking pictures? Listening to music? Why should my digital camera be limited to the 128-512 meg flash card I put into it? I have my iPod/MP3 player with hard drive on me! The camera could use the PAN to save images to the hard drive on the MP3 player. You could even separate the MP3 player from the hard drive, and use the PAN to stream from hard drive to a set of PAN-enabled headphones (or to an MP3 control device hooked up to the headphones).
So you put pictures you took with your digital camera onto the hard drive. Want to view them? Take out your PDA with its nice screen and view them on that via the PAN.
Want to get online? Pull out your PDA (or laptop) and have it interact seamlessly with your phone device to get online.
Walk up to a computer? Have it PAN-enabled so it detects who you are before you sit down (or not, depending on how security-minded you are).
The advantage of Bluetooth over 802.11[x] is the power constraints. Bluetooth and similar technologies are designed with battery life in mind. I do not want to have to charge every PAN device I have every night to make sure I do not run out of battery just walking around.
The technology to do all of this currently exists. I think this is the next step Bluetooth (or a Bluetooth replacement) needs to take.
- (c) 2018 Hank Zimmerman
I'd like to see better security protocols for Bluetooth. Vendors selling Bluetooth devices need to prevent their users from being "bluejacked", "bluesnarfed" and "bluebugged" and DoS attacks on their devices.
I use an Apple bluetooth keyboard on my Mac and love it. I don't use their mouse as it is still a one button jobby. Instead I use a non bluetooth optical wireless logitech mouse. When will apple learn that one button isn't enough. Their operating system allready supports a 3 button mouse with a scroll wheel.. duh!
Nick Powers
Encryption: I may not agree with what you say, but I will defend your right to encrypt it...
I'm waiting for someone to come out with a retro-style bluetooth headset modeled after Uhura's. You know it's going to happen
I hate to be picky, but I think everybody is using the word bandwidth to mean data rate.
Bandwidth has units of Hz and data rate has units of bits/sec. True that increasing the bandwidth of a signal can increase the data rate, but the reverse need no be the case.
In fact if you read the article they tell us that the increased data rate will be accomplished through changes in the data modulation (most likely by moving from binary phase shift keying, to quadrature phase shift keying, or higher).
DR. Null
Imagine a phone being broken into three pieces - a headset (similar to the Bluetooth ones you are seeing now), the actual phone receiver (for interacting with your provider) that is nothing more than a small matchbook sized piece without any UI, and then a full PDA to contain addresses and phone numbers. Want to call someone? Grab your PDA and hit a phone number. it uses the PAN to tell the phone what to dial, which then uses the PAN to interact with the headset.
Why imagine? This is exactly what I do every day. I have a Nokia 6310i, an Palm Tungsten T3 and a bluetooth headset. Furthermore my Thinkpad T30 also has bluetooth built in. Bluetooth is a mandatory feature for me now. Once you start using it, you'll wonder how you did without. It makes it vastly easier for electronic devices to communicate.
My phone is essentially a portable wireless base station in addition to being a phone. I can check email from either my PDA or laptop and connect through the phone without ever taking it out of my pocket or bag. If I need to sync my pda, no cables are necessary. I can touch dial numbers on my phone directly from my PDA address book. I just tap the number and it dials. I've surfed the web (albiet slowly) from my laptop while riding in a car on the highway and my phone was in the truck. Effectively my PDA and cell phone are a single device but I only have to carry the bits I'm actually going to use.
I see people compare bluetooth to 802.11X all the time but those folks miss the point. It's not about connecting to the internet. It's a replacement for almost any data-carrying wire. Bluetooth replaces my PDA sync cable, phone sync cable, mouse and keyboard USB cables, phone ear bud cable, and if needed my ethernet cable. Furthermore it could replace printer cables, IR ports, serial cables and several others. Most importantly I can take it anywhere.
WiFi is almost non-portable only replaces the ethernet cable because that is all it is designed to do. (and it does a good job of it, I'm not bashing WiFi) Bluetooth isn't optimized for what WiFi does so it's slower but also consumes less power and has other uses WiFi does not. If you are comparing WiFi to Bluetooth, you don't understand Bluetooth. Not everyone needs one or the other, but the comparison between them is silly. It's very much like comparing Firewire cables to Ethernet cables and arguing that one is better than the other. The argument just doesn't make sense.
Nokia seems to be unable to implement bluetooth correctly
I use a Nokia 6310i and bluetooth does work great. However I had to get a firmware update on my phone. If you have a 6310i, you need firmware revision 5.50. Other Nokia phones may have similar issues which could be the problem you are facing. If it is under warranty, you can get the upgrade done for free. Don't ask Nokia tech support, they're generally clueless with regard to Bluetooth and will tell you it's your adapter's fault. You might have to mail it in to get flashed depending on your location. I sent mine to Florida.
The bigger problem IMO with Nokia is their software on my PC which, to be blunt, sucks. It's nowhere near seamless to connect, very poorly designed, and is under some bizarre illusion that everyone uses Outlook in recent versions. Furthermore they have different versions for each phone which is completely not necessary.
Bluetooth certainly could use a boost in speed - but I see some bigger problems that could use addressing:
Cost - bluetooth was supposed to be insanely cheap to add to devices. I first read this claim - um - 5 years ago?
Chatty little bitch - bluetooth is extremely aggressive, and totally pollutes the airwaves when in use. That's all find and dandy considering that it's short range, but it's still not short ENOUGH for the amount of channel saturation that goes on. Try using other wireless technologies nearby bluetooth.
Of course, you're going to run into problems with different wireless technologies using the same spectrum - but bluetooth is *really* aggressive (at least 1.0/1.1) - that could use some work.
Maybe build in logic to only transmit, say, 10% more powerful than it needs to. Might slow down overall performance if things move out of range, but would certainly clean up the airwaves - and save some battery.
cyn, free software and *nix operating systems enthusiast.
This is only true for some of the earlier BT implementations on Nokia. Later models have better support. The support in Sony-Ericsson phones is great in my experience.
I mean, does anyone *actually* use bluetooth? It was a fine toy to tinker with for a few moments when I got a new telephone, but once I got the new Dell X300 laptop with the inbuilt bluetooth card and the corresponding drivers that simply don't work, I got right over bluetooth. Specially after all those security issues popped up, I've disabled bluetooth on every device I own.
Can they actually get Bluetooth to work as intended, a single standard that works! How much time have we all spent trying to get your seperate devices to talk, your windows drivers to play ball, and that bluetooth dongle to talk with your bluetooth phone...
I am currently looking at a C500 smartphone that refuses to activesync over bluetooth.
Lets keep it simple, and make sure it works!
I can't believe that nobody has mentioned yet, that the entire point of the new Bluetooth spec is compression.
"Three times more bandwidth", because it is being compressed typically at 3-to-1.
"Less power consumption", because you don't need to send as much data now, because it's compressed.
I'm hoping that this is purely a driver/firmware upgrade for most devices. I shouldn't have to re-buy my gadgets just to compress data down the line.
Karma: It's all a bunch of tree-huggin' hippy crap!
I disagree. The problem with Bluetooth is that it's massively over-specified. And, if anything, a couple of years after its time.
There are two major wireless specs: Bluetooth and WiFi (aka AirPort, 802.11). Now, in an ideal world, each would be properly adapted and tuned to its own field of use.
Originally, Bluetooth was seen as a replacement for IrDA (infra-red) and serial connections to and from small devices like PDAs and phones. And WiFi was seen as a replacement for network cables. So there are obvious differences: Bluetooth needed to be short-range, slow, low-power, and simple enough for small devices to implement cheaply and efficiently. WiFi needed to be fast, secure, have reasonable range, and masses of bandwidth.
Bluetooth, though, got ideas above its station, and wanted to take over some of WiFi's market too. Result: it's too complex, takes too much electrical and processing power, took too long to standardise, and not enough devices implement it (properly).
If they'd stuck to doing one thing and doing it well, we wouldn't be in this mess now...
At least, that's how I understand things. Please correct as necessary. I don't really care, anyway: my Psion and my phone still talk fine over IrDA...
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3 x 0 = 0
Do I see bluetooth spam on the rise when this happens? I mean imagine being able to spam 7 people at once instead of singles. Sounds like a pain to me!
101 commets in 12 hours! that says it more than any well considered argument. I guess Bluetooth just doesn't bring out anyone's child-like enthusiasm.
Celebrate Excellence!
It doesn't have to be seven people. Seven devices held by one person would seem to be enough to perform a DoS attack on a Bluetooth modem. I wonder if it's also possible to use one device which pretends to be seven. :-)
Karma: It's all a bunch of tree-huggin' hippy crap!
I wonder if it's also possible to use one device which pretends to be seven.
I would think it would be possible to construct a device that was one unit meant to deny access from any other - such a device would of course be called "Seven of Nein".
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
You Sir, are bang on the money with that post.
The MBOA SIG published its specifications for the physical layer. This means that standardisation is going full-speed ahead despite the deadlock in the IEEE, and there should be a full protocol stack by Christmas. It's covered in Techworld by (ahem) yours truly. And here's the MBOA SIG a href"http://www.multibandofdm.org/press_111004.htm l">press release.
Peter Judge
http://www.techworld.com/mobility