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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.""
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"
... 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?
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
like you don't really need a bluetooth keyboard and mouse on a home computer, it would be nice, but it not a problem to have wires there.
Actually I bought a Logitech wireless keyboard/mouse combo so I could sit back on the couch or recliner to play games on the TV or LCD projector. The range isn't great but I can move around without wires dangling (or my cat attacking them when they move)
Bluetooth would be cool for that as the range is much better than the Logitech solution.
Trolling is a art,
Uh, UWB is a complete radio spectrum and power hog (strange for wireless). Bluetooth's design is to maxmimize power efficiency; I hardly see them fulfilling the same niche for a long time.
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