Amsterdam, Netherlands - Even as the Bluetooth industry cheered consistent market growth, executives at the Bluetooth World Congress here last week faced up to the fact that the technology they champion is not firing the imaginations of consumers. One speaker bluntly called Bluetooth an "unknown technology" from the user's point of view, and a Texas Instruments manager said he feared that Bluetooth would wind up delivering "zero value" to consumers.

Nobody is questioning the vitality of the Bluetooth market, in which 400 unique Bluetooth products racked up a total of 30 million unit sales in 2002, a number that's expected to triple this year. "Under a tough economy, Bluetooth is one of the few product [areas] that is growing," said Maria Khorsand, president of Ericsson Technology Licensing. In-Stat/MDR predicts the Bluetooth market will swell to 600 million units in 2007.

Nevertheless, the technology's future remains far from clear as Bluetooth confronts something of an identity crisis. The Bluetooth industry is sending consumers "no clear message on what value [the technology] brings to them," said Paul Marino, general manager for business line connectivity at Philips Semiconductors.

Indeed, Bluetooth may end up offering "zero value for users," said Ari Rauch, general manager of the short-range wireless business unit at Texas Instruments Inc. He likened Bluetooth to the IrDA infrared spec. "Nobody is using IrDA today, despite the fact that IrDA-based infrared technology is embedded everywhere."

That Bluetooth's survival will depend on coexistence within a much larger wireless-technology universe was underscored by the conference itself. This year's was the last standalone Bluetooth Congress. Next year, Bluetooth technologies will be folded into a new event called Wireless Connectivity World, which will include wireless LANs and a number of other technologies.

Other evidence of Bluetooth's troubles surfaced here as mounting frustration over several outstanding issues. Besides practically nonexistent consumer awareness, problems include the difficulty level when users try to set up and pair Bluetooth devices, and the endless parade of so-called Bluetooth "profiles," which makes application-level Bluetooth interoperability virtually impossible for many OEMs.

Clearly, the debate within the Bluetooth community has moved from silicon-level issues such as cost, size and power consumption to the bigger picture-applications, systems and ease of use. "The Bluetooth Congress has always been very silicon-focused, but that's no longer our No. 1 concern," said Eric Klein, manager of emerging software solutions at Palm Solutions Group. "It's time to step back and figure out what customer problems we are trying to solve with Bluetooth."

As simple as this may sound, guiding Bluetooth's future in a market full of competing wireless standards-including WiFi, Zigbee and WiMedia-is no easy task. On the one hand, as Khorsand of Ericsson Technology Licensing said, "Bluetooth technology needs to evolve" for potential applications in medical electronics, industrial control and home automation. On the other, many caution that the higher the data rate gets, the more confusing the Bluetooth marketing message becomes.

Higher data rates

The Bluetooth Special Interest Group (SIG) is scheduled to ratify its Version 1.2 spec in September. Also under development are medium- and high-rate versions of Bluetooth (see www.eet.com/story/OEG20030618S0035). The medium-rate specification will increase the data rate from 1 Mbit/second to 2 to 3 Mbits/s; the high-rate spec will provide a tenfold boost in the base data rate.

Proponents of the future high-rate spec insist they have no intention of competing with wireless LANs, calling the upgrade not a replacement for WLAN technology but a natural evolution in the personal-area network (PAN). Still, skeptics wonder why anybody needs a high-rate Bluetooth when consumers can safely turn to WiFi for faster wireless file transfer or data streaming. For backward compatibility, high-rate Bluetooth will require an entirely different media-access controller (MAC) and radio than the current-generation Bluetooth circuitry.

"With WLAN, you are locked to a base-station," was the rebuttal from Jaap Haartsen, chief scientist at Ericsson Technology Licensing. "But with Bluetooth, designed for the PAN and for lower power consumption, you can move around without a coordinator."

This is an argument that might sound convincing to engineers knee-deep in technology development, but it does not clarify the value of Bluetooth for consumers who just want to use whatever wireless technology is available, said TI's Rauch.

To argue the advantage of Bluetooth takes a holistic view, not a simplistic data rate comparison, said Mike McCamon, executive director at Bluetooth SIG Inc. "Bluetooth can reliably provide a 1-Mbit/s data rate for both voice and data, even in a noisy high-density radio environment," McCamon said. In contrast, WLAN is not designed for voice, and it will have a harder time coping with lots of interference, he added. Further, "Bluetooth is also good for zero-latency applications such as mice and keyboards."

McCamon takes a relaxed attitude toward rival wireless technologies, saying, "The success of anything wireless-whether WLAN or Zigbee-is good for us." The more wireless technologies are used, he said, the clearer the Bluetooth advantages will become for the market. "Bluetooth is a well-thought-out, elegantly designed wireless technology," McCamon concluded.

While coexistence with wireless technologies such as WiFi and ultrawideband appears high on the Bluetooth community's agenda, not many had kind things to say about Zigbee last week. "I think Zigbee is dead at birth," said Scott Bibaud, director of marketing at Broadcom Corp.'s wireless wide-area network business unit. Bluetooth proponents say that their chips are already widely available, with prices and power consumption coming down to the point where they can be considered for applications such as industrial control and home automation-Zigbee's targets.

Indeed, on the last day of the conference, Ericsson Technology Licensing floated an idea for a new Bluetooth derivative-keeping the Bluetooth radio but optimizing the MAC-to go after the yet-to-be-created Zigbee market.

Friendly to mobiles

Moreover, Bluetooth has mobile phones as its best friend. "Mobile phones are pervasive and we are already in [that market]," said McCamon. But before the industry can make Bluetooth a ubiquitous wireless feature in consumer and computer products, backers must address its usability problems. Even McCamon fingered ease-of-use issues as "something that has haunted us."

The Bluetooth community is groping for a way to ensure that consumers can set up Bluetooth connectivity within five minutes of purchasing a Bluetooth-enabled device and taking it out of the box. Today, buyers of Bluetooth products spend several hours slogging through a menu, pairing Bluetooth devices and setting up rules before they can start connecting two Bluetooth-enabled systems.

In an ambitious attempt to directly address the "pairing" issue, Masanobu Yoshida, president of the handheld computer company at Sony Corp., unveiled during his keynote speech a proprietary Bluetooth application technology called Feel that's designed to enable instant connectivity among Sony's own Bluetooth products. Using middleware and application software that are currently under development, Yoshida demonstrated that the Feel technology can bring "instant connection-one step, one second" to Bluetooth devices.

Along with usability, the endless proliferation of "profiles" remains one of the hot-button issues within the Bluetooth community. For many OEMs, it is an overwhelming task to determine the applicability of suitable profiles for each of their devices, said Palm's Klein. Today, Palm supports three of Bluetooth's 20 active profiles-basically, high-layer software packages tailored for specific functions-including serial, object exchange and dial-up network.

There is no agreement within the industry as to which profiles must be supported in which products: that's left up to device manufacturers. But if a cell phone supports one profile and a PDA another, the two will not be interoperable.