[IP] Ericsson ditches Bluetooth
Begin forwarded message:
From: Dewayne Hendricks <dewayne@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: September 6, 2004 9:20:04 AM EDT
To: Dewayne-Net Technology List <dewayne-net@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Subject: [Dewayne-Net] Ericsson ditches Bluetooth
Reply-To: dewayne@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
[Note: I posted an article about this move by Ericsson about a week
ago. Here's a new one with lots more detail about their decision and
the future of Bucktooth. DLH]
Original URL:
<http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/09/06/ericsson_drops_bluetooth_dev/>
Ericsson ditches Bluetooth
By Wireless Watch (peter at rethinkresearch.biz)
Published Monday 6th September 2004 09:20 GMT
Analysis Ericsson, the inventor of Bluetooth, has ended years of
aggressively positioning the short range standard for dominance and has
stopped developing new products. This is a sign that the market has
become one for volume suppliers, not innovators, but it highlights a
broader sense that, while the current generation of Bluetooth will
achieve a large base, the next generation will be pushed into niches by
emerging alternatives —if they can avoid Bluetooth’s many mistakes.
Ericsson’s decision to pull the plug on its Bluetooth design and
manufacturing activities do not sound a death knell for the short range
wireless technology, but they do show that the standard has reached
maturity – with no obviously viable next generation.
This means that innovators like Ericsson will turn to other
technologies with greater market potential and Bluetooth, within a few
years, will be confined to a few niches.
Ericsson spun off its Bluetooth group, Technology Licensing, which
invented the technology, in 2000. It currently has 125 employees, 100
working in R&D and including the core of Ericsson's original Bluetooth
development team. They are expected to be transferred to other parts of
the company. Ericsson will still support Bluetooth chip customers such
as Philips but will not develop new designs or seek new clients for the
current one.
We should not overplay the negative impact of Ericsson backing away
from Bluetooth. The standard is sufficiently mature that it can make
its own fortunes without being too dependent on the support of even its
most major backer. Just as Nokia’s ambivalence about the Wi-MAX
standard it helped to create no longer has the negative effect that it
would have done a year earlier, so Bluetooth has grown beyond its
parent. But the move does show that the Swedish company has decided
there is no future for the technology significant enough to justify the
backing of a major player.
This comes after years when Ericsson has been highly active in
promoting the enhancement of Bluetooth to be more attractive to its
target markets. Having developed the initial concept of a wireless
cable replacement a decade ago, the Bluetooth SIG was formed in 1998
and the technology was adopted as the basis of the IEEE 802.15.4
standard for low power, short range communications. However, despite
that success, it was dogged by problems of interoperability, high
prices and fragmentation, and never gained significant ground in the US
- 65 per cent of Bluetooth shipments are in Europe, compared to 10 per
cent in the Americas, and the less cellular-oriented culture of the US
has focused most heavily on Wi-Fi for wireless communications.
The last example of Ericsson making major efforts to adapt Bluetooth
and ensure its future growth came in July 2003 when it floated the idea
of producing a lightweight version of the standard to compete with
Zigbee in industrial control and automation. Jaap Haartsen, chief
scientist at Ericsson Technology Licensing, had a team working on a
version of Bluetooth that would use the same radio but optimize and
shrink the media access controller (MAC) for real time automation
applications, creating a derivative that consumed significantly less
power. Haartsen said at the time that Ericsson had solved the main
drawback of Bluetooth compared to Zigbee, its relatively high latency
arising from its use of frequency hopping – frequency hopping that
gives it better range and robustness than Zigbee’s ‘direct sequence
spread spectrum’ approach.
Commodity play
There is no longer a role in Bluetooth chips for a company that expects
to innovate and achieve high margins and the baton will pass to
commodity, high volume chipmakers. This is a natural cycle that has
also affected 802.11b, but the difference is that companies at the high
end of the Wi-Fi food chain had the prospect of shifting their efforts,
and R&D budgets, into new generations of the technology such as 802.11g
and 802.11n. Bluetooth, by contrast, is looking increasingly like a
dead-end as emerging alternatives such as UltraWideBand position to
take its territory. As such, it will be a good market for volume
chipmakers for a few more years but will not have an obvious future
survival path.
The future for Bluetooth
One vendor leaving the camp does not kill a standard, even when that
vendor was the key inventor of Bluetooth and, in the early years,
played a role similar to Intel’s in WiMAX in terms of promoting its
favored technology. But it is a good indicator of several trends for
short range wireless communications. One is that, while volumes will
grow - devices incorporating Bluetooth are predicted to quadruple in
number between now and 2008, from under 100m to about 440m - success
will lie in efficient manufacturing and strong OEM alliances, not in
innovation. Ericsson is increasingly looking to intellectual property
and advanced design for new revenue streams, and Bluetooth offers few
opportunities there any longer. It said that there was no obvious
business case now that so many companies were making Bluetooth silicon.
Another trend is for Bluetooth to be beaten back into certain markets
rather than fulfilling its original, and wildly overhyped, promise to
be a general purpose cable replacement in any applications requiring
communications over short distances. Its key market is now, of course,
the mobile phone, for connections to headsets, car kits and so on.
Hence, having closed down its Bluetooth Technology Licensing group,
Ericsson will continue to support products and offer Bluetooth
software, but within its Mobile Platforms unit. It will also continue
to be a promoter within the Bluetooth Special Interest Group, which
drives the development of the standard.
The best market for Bluetooth is the mobile phone, with a niche, driven
by companies like BT, for connecting handsets to the wireline network.
Other key sectors are in-car communications and industrial control. All
these are big markets, but Bluetooth’s position within them has now
been placed into more realistic perspective. It is, after all, a low
data rate, very short distance technology, and even before Wi-Fi went
mainstream, it was naïve to portray it as a full scale wireless LAN. It
can connect handsets efficiently to car systems, but it cannot support
in-car internet access or transmission of multimedia to passengers as
802.11a can.
The next generation
That's fine, but the problem for Bluetooth is that newer short range
technologies - its younger relatives in the IEEE 802.15 personal area
networking family - will start to usurp even its true strongholds in
the next generation. Current Bluetooth standards are gaining ground,
but have not achieved a sufficient level of acceptance - especially in
the critical auto market - to be irreplaceable; while the next
generation versions may be too little, too late to fend off the
challenge from UltraWideBand, the technology that could underpin both
low and high data rate PANs within two years.
Bluetooth is not standing still and letting its rival take over by
default. In June, the Bluetooth SIG took the important step of adopting
Enhanced Data Rate (EDR) specifications which introduce new modulation
approaches that boost data rates to 2- 3Mbps, rather than the current
1Mbps or less. EDR, importantly, also improves quality of service and
the higher rates allow core applications to be achieved with lower
power - more important in most Bluetooth markets, such as industrial
control, than raw speed.
Last week, RF Micro Devices began sampling a Bluetooth system on a chip
(SoC) supporting 3Mbps speeds, following market leader CSR, which
sampled a Bluetooth core with SDR earlier in the summer, with full
production scheduled for this month.
The Bluetooth Special Interest Group is already calling for input to a
new roadmap to ensure a future for its platform. Earlier this year, the
SIG set up a roadmap committee to work on directions and timing for the
next major iteration of the standard, expected in late 2005 and called
for any interested parties to submit ideas. This was widely seen as an
acknowledgement that Bluetooth has often failed to listen sufficiently
to the real requirements of its market, a factor in its slower than
expected uptake. Markus Schetelig, chairman of the SIG, acting chair of
the roadmap committee and a senior manager at Nokia, said: "Now that
the key specs are mature, we are getting to the point where there will
be a bigger payoff for being closely linked with market demands."
Also, two different SIG committees are looking at real-time streaming
extensions for the standard - the A/V Working Group is developing a
consumer electronics focused version, based on the Internet Engineering
Taskforce’s Real Time Protocol, while a second group of PC-oriented
companies is looking at streaming over IP.
Challenges from UWB and ZigBee
This effort is almost certain to be sidelined by UltraWideBand –
whether or not it becomes an IEEE standard, the technology underpins
several developments by chipmakers from Intel to Motorola targeted at
digital media applications and will be incorporated in equipment from
the likes of Sony from next year.
Even in Bluetooth’s core markets, it faces challenges from ZigBee and
low powered versions of Wi-Fi. There is considerable pressure to unify
wireless LANs and PANs, especially in the home, around common physical
layers. Some argue Wi-Fi should be the common factor, and are pushing
very low power implementations that would be suitable for
Bluetooth-style applications and chip costs. Others favor UWB as the
unified layer, and support proposals for the technology to underpin the
next generations of both ZigBee and WiMedia, plus wireless
implementations of USB and 1394 connections.
Of course, the newer standards will face many of the challenges that
Bluetooth has. One is the interference question for any network in
2.4GHz space, a major issue for ZigBee. Now that ZigBee silicon is just
starting to ship, research by InStat/MDR predicts that it will achieve
shipments of 150m units by 2008. The biggest challenge for ZigBee,
especially if it is to take on home applications such as intruder
monitoring, as well as factory environments, is to ensure it does not
suffer interference from other technologies in the 2.4GHz band, where
Bluetooth and 802.11b/g also live. There is work underway on
coexistence with 2.4GHz Wi-Fi, and some vendors are exploring use of
the 915MHz band too, plus an UWB version would give greater spectrum
flexibility.
Fragmentation
Another danger to the newer standards, which should be flagged up by
Bluetooth’s experience, is fragmentation. The political battles over
the specifications for the UWB-based 802.15.3a standard – in which
Motorola and Texas Instruments are fighting to have their approach
ratified - raises the greatest question mark over the future success of
UWB, and echoes some of the problems that have held back Bluetooth.
The Bluetooth community has often failed to unify its technologies to
the degree required by the user base, and nowhere has this been clearer
than in the car market, a natural for the technology, but which it has
threatened to throw away with infighting and inconsistent products.
Car manufacturers have demanded that the Bluetooth community create a
stable, standardized method for data synchronization between a car kit
and mobile handset for applications such as telephone directory and
express frustration that the Bluetooth SIG has failed to agree on a
method. For instance, accessing a phonebook or SIM card via Bluetooth
is demanded by customers but is still not supported in the current
version of the Bluetooth Hands-Free Profile, according to BMW.
The wider issue of a standard set of profiles supported in all
Bluetooth phones is also holding back adoption in cars. For instance,
many phones support only one of the headset and handsfree profiles
rather than both, which disappoints buyers who expect the ‘Bluetooth’
label to enable both types of usage. A separate phonebook access
profile is under development.
As the Bluetooth SIG starts to address many of these issues – and as
challengers are likely to be slowed down by their own efforts to do the
same – the technology will get stronger before it fades away. But the
best hope for Bluetooth is not to try to be all things to all people
but to go for niches where it performs well, and for strong coexistence
with its apparent rivals. It will be helped by the increasing ease of
integrating multiple radios into relatively compact, low power devices
such as handsets. Intel, Philips and Texas Instruments, among others,
have dual-mode WLAN / Bluetooth systems and Finnish company BlueGiga
Technologies has developed the first device that supports multiple
Bluetooth modules and routes traffic between then and Wi-Fi, GSM, GPRS
and Ethernet Lan.
Such developments no longer force device makers to choose just one
technology and so Bluetooth does not have to win a head-tohead battle,
just to provide a useful function alongside Wi-Fi or cellular. However,
from 2007, we can expect this usefulness to be reduced in many areas,
and for Bluetooth to be squeezed cruelly between Wi-Fi and the
UWB-based group of technologies. Ericsson’s cooling of interest will
not cause the death of Bluetooth, but it has highlighted its short life
expectancy.
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