Discovering Bluetooth

Bluetooth vs. Infrared Undeniably, Bluetooth technology has its application-base firmly founded in Infrared. Even today, manufacturers have not abandoned this tried and trusted technology for the more omnipresent wireless equivalent. Take a closer look at your cellular phone and your ... [full story]

Bluetooth: A Cable Replacement Technology The thought of dipping into the various Bluetooth-specific specifications is something which shouldn’t be done lightheartedly. An engineer suitably equipped with a jug of coffee and other caffeine-based products should only then, but not necessarily ... [full story]

Bluetooth key management Like WPA2, Bluetooth also relies on effective key management where again numerous keys are used in combination to ensure data encryption and integrity. We have already introduced a few significant keys that are used during the authentication ... [full story]

Regulatory The Regulatory group is responsible for ensuring that the Bluetooth wireless technology complies with the huge number of existing regulations present around the globe. The main Regulatory group comprises four subgroups, each focusing on a particular regulatory area: • ... [full story]

Management Services The Management Services group is the administrative part of the Bluetooth SIG. In other words, this is the group that handles all the paperwork and the general day-to-day running of the organization. [full story]

The Structure The initial objective of the Bluetooth SIG was to develop, as quickly as possible, an open specification for the Bluetooth wireless technology. To that end, the SIG was organized into a number of groups and committees, each focusing ... [full story]

Associate Members Associate memberships are available to all companies that want a higher level of participation in the Bluetooth organization than what is granted to adopter members. While not nearly as powerful as the nine promoter members, associ-ate members can ... [full story]

Promoter Members In December 1999, four new companies joined the SIG’s founding members as newlychristened promoter members. These new members, all major players in the world of high tech, included: • 3Com Corporation • Lucent Technologies, Inc. • Microsoft Corporation ... [full story]

The Bluetooth Industry The entire Bluetooth industry—all the companies developing products and services based on the Bluetooth wireless technology—is centralized in an industry group called the Bluetooth Special Interest Group (SIG). The Bluetooth SIG not only creates and updates the ... [full story]

Why Bluetooth? Now that we’ve had our history lesson, the question still remains: Why is this new wireless technology named after a 10th-century Danish king? It’s all about King Harald’s ability to unite. Like King Harald, the Bluetooth technology unites ... [full story]

A Viking King First, the history. Harald (sometimes spelled Harold) Bluetooth, the future king of Denmark, was born in the year 911 A.D. He lived to the ripe old age of 74, dying in 985. Harald was born to royalty, ... [full story]

Dealing with Reality Now that the Specification was written, the individual member companies of the Bluetooth SIG had an even more formidable challenge—to design and build real products that utilized the Bluetooth wireless technology. Dealing with the technology in theory ... [full story]

Fueling the Hype The power behind the standard also attracted the attention of the world’s press. By mid-2000 you could hardly open a newspaper or magazine without reading some story about the upcoming Bluetooth technology. (Co-inventor Jaap Haartsen was even ... [full story]

Dealing with Reality Now that the Specification was written, the individual member companies of the Bluetooth SIG had an even more formidable challenge—to design and build real products that utilized the Bluetooth wireless technology. Dealing with the technology in theory ... [full story]

Building Interest The release of the Bluetooth Specification was only the beginning of the Bluetooth story. Now that there were technical specifications to guide the development of Bluetooth-enabled devices, other companies started to jump on the Bluetooth bandwagon. Ericsson and ... [full story]

An Astonishing Achievement Thanks to the combination of intelligent organization, frequent communications, and lots of long hours from all involved, the first release of the Bluetooth Specification was completed in about 18 months—an astonishing achievement, given the scope of the ... [full story]

The Need for Speed Recognizing the importance of bringing this new technology to market on the fastest possible schedule, the Bluetooth SIG was organized into a number of topic-specific working groups. Each working group attacked a particular portion of the ... [full story]

On May 20th, 1998, these five companies—Ericsson, IBM, Intel, Nokia, and Toshiba—held simultaneous press conferences in London, England; San Jose, California; and Tokyo, Japan. The purpose of this global press briefing was to announce that the five companies had joined together to develop ... [full story]

Ericsson continued to talk with other companies, now determined to create a consortium to develop and push the technology across a variety of business disciplines. They were searching for the right industry mix—ideally, market leaders in mobile telephony, portable computing, and digital signal ... [full story]

With this thinking in mind, Ericsson approached several manufacturers of portable electronic devices (both phones and computers) to discuss the development and the promotion of this new short-range radio technology. As the talks progressed, Ericsson discovered that they could best achieve their goals ... [full story]

Ericsson realized that for the technology to succeed, there must be a critical mass of portable devices using their newly developed short-range radio. Unless the technology was embraced by a large number of other manufacturers, it would fail due to lack of ... [full story]

As the MC Link project progressed, Mattisson and Haartsen became aware that there were other types of applications that could benefit from the technology they were developing. Ericsson’s cheap, short-range MC Link radios could make wireless communication between all types of portable devices ... [full story]

In the early 1990s, the market for mobile phones was exploding—particularly in Europe, which (unlike the U.S.) was unburdened by multiple, competing cellular standards. If you’re an American who has never been to Europe, it’s difficult to envision how pervasive mobile telephony is ... [full story]

As with any new technology, it will take time for Bluetooth to become accepted and established. Despite all the hype over the past few years, the very first Bluetooth-enabled devices are just now hitting the market; it will take several years for ... [full story]

You now know that Bluetooth is a technology for wireless connections and communications. So what? It sounds neat and sufficiently high-tech, of course, but just how will this technology impact your life? The Bluetooth SIG—the organization pushing the development and adoption of the ... [full story]

Bluetooth does all this by embedding a small, low-powered radio-on-a-chip into a traditional electronic device. This radio—and the chip-based software associated with it—is capable of transmitting and receiving both data and voice communications from other such devices. Bluetooth radios use a radio band ... [full story]

Bluetooth is a global technology standard that attempts to bridge the computer and communications industries. It has been adopted by all the major players in the telecom and computer worlds, as well as an interesting cross-section of companies in other industries— including the ... [full story]

Knowing that Bluetooth enables smart, totally ad hoc wireless communications between different electronic devices, one doesn’t have to think hard to imagine other uses of this technology. For example, imagine • A PDA that controls a desktop computer used to display a PowerPoint-based presentation—and ... [full story]

Another application of Bluetooth technology is in the world of telecommunications. If you’re like most high-tech consumers, you’re currently juggling several different phones, and several different phone numbers. You probably have a cordless phone at home, and a more complex phone system in ... [full story]

Bluetooth is more than just a cable-replacement technology, however. It’s also a technology that enables any electronic device to communicate with any other electronic device, automatically. This means that, over short distances (30 feet or so), your cell phone or personal digital assistant ... [full story]

Consider the common chore of hooking up a printer to your personal computer. Today you have to buy a big, thick, ungainly cable with multi-pin connectors on either end, plug the cable into the proper ports on the back of both your ... [full story]

The computing, communications, and consumer electronics industries have introduced many benefits to today’s consumers. Of course, they’ve also introduced many headaches, not the least of which is the necessity of connecting all these devices to each other, usually with a phalanx of cables ... [full story]