A little over five years ago five companies introduced a new concept: a standards-based wireless technology for replacing wires everywhere. Ericsson, IBM, Intel, Nokia and Toshiba announced Bluetooth. Now, after five years of fits and starts Bluetooth suppliers have shipped more than 50 million single- and multichip Bluetooth solutions, and Agere Systems, Microsoft and Motorola have joined the five founding companies in the Promoter Group.

Other technologies have emerged to take on new tasks prompted by the concept of wireless connectivity. ZigBee is targeting opportunities in industry and home automation; WiMedia, high-bandwidth applications such as USB and Firewire (IEEE 1394) with ultrawideband, known as UWB. Finally, Philips and Sony have announced an RFID-like technology called near-field communications (NFC) that is intended to facilitate secure connections between devices (possibly using one of the other wireless connectivity standards).

Nokia, Philips and Sony created the NFC Forum, in March 2004. It is to establish the standards for implementing touch-based interactions among a variety of communications and consumer electronics devices and for making payments. One option is for the interaction to be conducted over one of the other connectivity standards.

The ZigBee and WiMedia Alliances have announced that they will have their standards completed by the end of 2004 with standards-compliant products ready to be shipped in 2005. The NFC Forum, since it is newly formed, will likely not follow until next year.

These are emerging standards and the market opportunity for them will develop over the next five years. The potential for each of them is large, potentially in the multiple hundreds of millions of units per year. The question is how the markets will develop.

While it could be said that the Bluetooth market developed much slower than it might have because of the learning process associated with a new technology, a case can be made that each of the other wireless connectivity standards will have a learning process as well. Certainly the development of the 802.15.3a standard has not gone as smoothly as the standards group or its members would have liked, which has slowed the time-to-market.

In other markets the time for acceptance may also be longer. New consumer and industrial markets can have long delays while people or companies get used to a new way of doing things, or while they wait for old systems to wear out before installing new ones. With this in mind we have developed a forecast (see figure) for the wireless connectivity standards based on the assumption that they will experience the same adoption rate as Bluetooth, reaching 50 million units five years after being announced.

Stan Bruederle is research vice president at Gartner Semiconductor Research (San Jose, Calif.).