Waiting for the wireless office
ANALYSIS: Bluetooth technology was heralded as the future of digital communication. So where is it?
By Paul Bradshaw
If you're interested in mobile telephony or wireless computing, the chances are you will have heard of Bluetooth, the technology which promises to connect just about any device to any other - and all without a wire or remote control in sight.
Bluetooth was heralded as the solution to all those frustrating problems that having too many wires create - the tangle at the back of the desk; having to "dock" your PDA in order to synchronise it with your computer; or plugging in a digital camera in order to print off a picture.
At its most basic level the technology does away with all the competing standards - USBs, serial ports, parallel ports, infrared connections - and sticks to one: radio waves. Even more impressively, more than 1,000 companies - including the big names - have agreed to let their products accept the Bluetooth standard.
This is crucial. When a Bluetooth-enabled Nokia phone comes within range of, say, a similarly equipped Toshiba digital camera, the first thing they do is strike up a conversation. This goes along the lines of, "Do we have anything to say to one another? Yes? Well, who's in charge then?" If they have something to communicate, they set up a little Personal Area network (PAN) - like a Local Area Network (LAN), only smaller, as Bluetooth's range only extends to around nine metres.
What this means is that phones, printers, PDAs, computers and entertainment systems can all converse, even if they're not within sight of one another. You could play sound files through your stereo, use speech recognition software on your PC to transcribe conversations on your mobile phone, or print off pictures from whatever device they sit on - all without having to touch a wire.
So where is this wonderful world? Well, as with all new technologies, the progress is not so quick as the promise. Companies who had been quick to praise the technology when it first emerged over a year ago weren't always so quick to include it. And when you could buy a Bluetooth printer but weren't able to find a Bluetooth-enabled PDA to use with it, the purchase seemed a little pointless.
But the tide is beginning to turn. The CEO of one of the world's biggest notebook manufacturers, Quanta, has said that the company will begin to include Bluetooth in most, if not all, of its notebooks later this year. Apple, meanwhile, has added Bluetooth support to OS X, and is selling a tiny USB Bluetooth adapter for under £40.
Announcements like these have led research firm IDC to report this month that revenue from Bluetooth-related products should grow from £49.3 million last year to £1.6 billion in 2006.
The real promoters of Bluetooth technology, however, will be the mobile phone companies, who are increasingly keen to find new reasons to persuade people to invest in new phones. Just last month, Orange started offering a PDA-and-phone package with Bluetooth connection between the two - for a price at least £150 less than you'd pay for the two separately without Bluetooth.
Bluetooth has suffered a lot in recent months from competition from other wireless networking standards, in particular Wi-Fi. Wi-Fi - also known as 802.11b - has a much wider range. But Bluetooth costs less to insert and consumes less energy.
In the fallout from this competition what has become clear is that the two technologies will coexist and serve different purposes. Bluetooth will work better in terms of "Personal Area Networks" and working on the move, while Wi-Fi may come to dominate the Local Area Network (larger office) sector. Which one you use - if not both - may depend on what sort of office you are working in.
It's clear either way that for a good five years at least, wireless technologies as a whole will begin to infiltrate our working practices. But analysts still think this will be through adapters and cards for a while to come. So it seems that the wireless office is still a few years away yet…