Why does Bluetooth still not work the way it should?

Anybody who knows me knows that I have been a supporter and promoter of Bluetooth technology since it first started to poke its head above the parapet, way back in 1998. But there is an elephant in my room, and its tusks are blue! Despite all the good work that the Bluetooth SIG and all its responsible member companies have done, it is still the case that Bluetooth phones, headsets etc sometimes don't work the way they should.

Example - I use a Nokia N96 with a Jabra JX20 headset - both high-end products from respected companies. The two are paired and work OK on first connection. But, if I go out of range, or switch the headset off for some reason, they then will not reconnect. I have to switch the headset off and re-boot the phone. In a given day this can happen several times. Most frustrating.

After 11 years of Bluetooth development, and with two products from a couple of the most respected manufacturers, this really shouldn't be happening. And this isn't isolated. A lot of kit passes through our hands, and similar things happen all the time. I'm in the industry, so I keep using this kit, but what will consumers be thinking?

I've put the question to the wireless community, and Peter Hauser, CEO of The Quality Factory came back with these observations?

I'm surprised nobody is willing to comment here!

Your question: "Why does Bluetooth still not work the way it should?" is more a question about "Quality" than it is about "Conformance to the Bluetooth standard" and therein lies the problem...

First of-all, there will always be a struggle between innovation and conformance to a standard. Every company wants, and needs to innovate. This implies that every company seeks to use the standards in new and interesting ways, and when they do, they make "assumptions" as to how other, compatible products, will react, thus creating the first problem...

For instance, the Bluetooth standards speak little about timing tolerances for commands and responses (beyond the standard timeouts). Some devices can respond very quickly to a command, while others cannot. If, however, a device is EXPECTING a delayed response and instead receives a very rapid one, if the firmware is intolerant, it could cause the device to lock-up.

Also - the Bluetooth standards do not currently address most multi-profile scenarios. It is only recently that the common "HFP, HSP, A2DP, and AVRCP" in a single device scenario was examined more closely for integration into the specifications AND the play/pause behavior (you know, where Play means Play, and Pause means Pause) has changed between the whitepaper and the specifications.

In short, unless companies are willing to invest in clarifying and standardizing their assumptions, these types of problems will continue.

And then, there's the issue of QUALITY.

With Bluetooth technology's pull towards commoditization, this complex technology is now in the hands of implementers who don't understand its intricacies and are building products based on new assumptions. Couple that with reduced development budgets for commodity products, and you have all of the makings of a reduction in product quality.

Teams are no longer "expected" to attend such events as UPF and to conduct extensive interoperability tests. Instead, they are expected to keep development budgets as low as possible.

All the while, new platforms are opening-up APIs that enable 3rd party applications to affect the Bluetooth performance. For instance, a mobile phone may have three separate music players on it. If one of those music players interacts with the Bluetooth A2DP/AVRCP (music) stack in an unexpected fashion, it could damage otherwise solid interoperability with wireless stereo headsets.

So - I guess the answer to your very simple question is quite complex.

If companies are going to do a really good job making their solutions "work" in the real world, they need to take the time to understand the assumptions made by products that already exist in the marketplace (of which there are many), find the similarities in these assumptions, and design accordingly.

Then, they need to TEST, TEST, and TEST again.

Thanks, Peter. Other contributions on this topic are very welcome. In the meantime, I may just have to change my own gadgets on a more often basis to check whether this situation is getting better, or worse.

After all, a Nokia N96 has been around for quite a while now ....

Don’t believe the UWB rubbish

Paraphrasing the great Mark Twain, the rumours of UWB’s demise have been greatly exaggerated. I admit that I am lucky enough to have a set of contacts in the wireless industry that give me a bit of an advantage over the average, broadstroke tech journalist, but it does get my goat when I read the guff currently being distributed by a lot of august members of the technology press.

If we are to believe what the media is saying, UWB is dead or dying. Now, I admit that I am no engineer, and that my view is more commercially than bits’n’bytes -based, but this is just not the case. For all sorts of reasons of which I do have a sound-enough understanding, UWB has an important and valuable role to play in the medium and long-term high speed wireless market.

Why is UWB struggling, and why is it currently on the back foot? Well, there are various reasons, some relating to a shortage of funding for UWB companies that are within a frustratingly short time of shipping product out of the door. Others are political. One industry luminary, for example, puts the failure of UWB to make it into Bluetooth 3.0 squarely at the door of one other individual. Nobody wants to name names at the moment, though, so I have to sit on this one. Meanwhile, Wi-Fi proponents rub their hands.

One thing is for sure though. The remaining UWB companies have failed to keep the PR going. Nobody has been saying anything positive, and so it is no wonder that the media has made assumptions, jumped to conclusions, and has broadcast to the world that UWB is an ex-factor.

The passage of time could prove me wrong, but I believe that UWB/Wireless USB will succeed and I’m ready to eat my hat if it doesn’t happen. Real products are hitting the streets – the Leyio and other products in the June issue of Incisor - and that really is the proof of the pudding. And the UWB companies are waking up to the need to let the world know that they are still here. Staccato Communications was one of the original trailblazers, and it is with great pleasure that I welcome the San Diego company back as an Incisor sponsor. Read Staccato’s take on the UWB market in the June issue of Incisor.

My message? Don’t believe everything you read in the press. Unless it is in Incisor.

Get off your backsides - failure isn't an option!

I wonder how many of you will have seen our humorous advert on page 17 of the latest issue of Incisor?

I hoped that our readers would appreciate the light-hearted tone, but there is a serious message there. At this time, marketing and PR seem to have ground to a halt in the industries that we cover. This is inextricably linked to a great deal of commercial uncertainty, courtesy of the global economic recession. Yet, every company that we work with wants and needs to stay financially secure, and what is the one thing that can underpin that? Sales, or course. Can a company expect to grow or even maintain current sales levels if it is invisible to the market? No, of course not.

Incisor is no different, and I will do whatever I can to keep my company safe too. That means talking to all of my business contacts, and exploring options as to how we can help each other.

The Incisor global audience is just as interested today in short-range wireless technology as it was 6-9 months ago, before the financial market imploded. I have recently been distributing a sample list of new subscribers that have signed up for Incisor in just the last two months. The quality of Incisor's subscribers is evident from this list, but bear in mind that this is just new subscriptions from the last 8 weeks. Our subscriber base is made up of many thousands of similar people who have all asked to receive Incisor since we started publishing in 1998. Hand on heart, I can say that this is a database that gets you directly to the most accurately targeted database imaginable for any company operating in the short-range wireless industry.

Most of the companies around me are in 'rabbit in the headlights' mode at the moment, but there is hope for those not prepared to sit around and wait for Armageddon. As I say in the title, failure isn't an option, and anyone talking to me at the moment about spreading their messages will find that I've effectively thrown the Incisor rate card out of the window.

Let's all make some noise, and keep the Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, UWB, DECT, NFC, RFID, ZigBee and any other form of wireless fandango industry moving along.

The alternative is too awful to contemplate. I might have to get a proper job.

Why is Wi-Fi still so hard??? And long live the USB cable!

You would think that somebody who has been writing about wireless technology for 10 years would know their way around a piece of kit, wouldn't you?

Well, today's experience proves otherwise.

Why? Well, I bought a new HP all in one printer, scanner fax thingy this week, and for the first time I had the option to print over a Wi-Fi connection. I already have a Wi-Fi router and my laptop accesses my broadband connection using that. No problem.

So, you would think that in this day and age it would be fairly simple to hook up a laptop and printer via Wi-Fi. It is heck as like! I've now spent two and a half hours trying to make this work and am still getting nowhere.

I can hear you saying - RTFM - well I have, and that didn't help because I don't have a degree in computer engineering and this FM would be no help to anyone with less than that level of expertise. Try the HP web site, you say. I did, I say. And got nowhere. Salvation seemed to be at hand when I saw that there was a link to a page where I could actually speak to somebody on the phone. Perfect! Just what I wanted. Doubtless I would have to pay somebody to tell me how their piece of kit should work (don't you just think that is criminal?), but I don't mind. I've already wasted a huge chunk of my day trying to achieve what should be a simple task. But no - when I click on the link the HP site just freezes, the progress bar stops at two green boxes and the message says at the bottom says 'waiting to connect to ....'. AAAAGGGGHHHH!!!! I often think these companies just don't want to have to face up to their responsibilities as happens when they get a frustrated punter on the phone. Yes, I've seen the stats about how one tech support call to a network operator wipes out the profit on the customer's cellular bill for several months. So they make it as difficult as possible, or even impossible.

It is a travesty that this type of equipment is foisted on the unsuspecting public without proper support. In Incisor last month the WPANel exec committee all talked about the marketing of wireless technology. I think there are still a lot of industry execs out there who are kidding themselves if they think enough is being done to help ordinary people use consumer electronics, and in my case particularly wireless technology.

So, I will continue using my new printer via a USB cable. And the blue Wi-Fi light on the printer (didn't Bluetooth grab the rights on blue LEDs?) will continue to stare balefully at me from across the desk.

There is a lot of work to be done, wireless marketeers.

What to make of the Bluetooth SIG / WiMedia merger?

This merger has been a long time coming, believe you me. I’ve known that the WiMedia Alliance was to be merged into the Bluetooth SIG for nearly a year, but couldn’t talk about it. There have been some things to sort out, and it has taken until now for the two parties to decide that they can go public.

So, what is the official line? The lead statement from a press release issued by the WiMedia Alliance today (I have stripped the whole version in at the end of this piece) says: “The WiMedia Alliance announced today it is entering into technology transfer agreements for the WiMedia Ultra-wideband (UWB) specifications. WiMedia will transfer all current and future specifications, including work on future high speed and power optimized implementations, to the Bluetooth Special Interest Group (SIG), Wireless USB Promoter Group and the USB Implementers Forum. After the successful completion of the technology transfer, marketing and related administrative items, the WiMedia Alliance will cease operations.”

Note that the WiMedia Alliance is the only one to press release this. The Bluetooth SIG has chosen to restrict itself to telling only its members. There are reasons, but they are not for public debate.

Note too that the WiMedia Alliance is also transferring ownership to the Wireless USB Promoter Group and the the USB Implementers Forum. Now, unlike the Bluetooth SIG and every other wireless industry alliance that Incisor works with, those two USB organisations go completely their own way and are somewhat insular. I can’t be bothered to keep trying to talk to them so if you need comment from them I wish you good luck. But the fact that they are there means this is really a ménage a trois, not a two-party party. And there are implications, as we shall see below.
And what does the announcement really mean? Well, the WiMedia Alliance will disappear, for a start. There is due to be a member meeting in Seattle later this month. Whether this is to go ahead or not, I don’t know.

The Bluetooth SIG will continue to develop UWB as the second (and ultimately fastest and lowest power) high speed data channel for Bluetooth. Wi-Fi is the short term solution.

What are the real issues? Well, as I see it, they are these:


Was this really necessary?

Starting with this first, there are two observations. First, WiMedia has been struggling to make UWB stick for some time. Struggling not because there is anything shabby about the underlying technology, but because it has been swimming in a big pond with a lot of other aggressive fish. To take any technology to widespread adoption takes a lot of commitment and a not insignificant amount of money. At the best of times this would have been a big ask, but with UWB taking a long time to get to market, and then that situation colliding headlong with a major global recession, it was quite possible that failure was an option. The WiMedia Alliance needed to align with a major partner, and the Bluetooth SIG was the obvious answer. As I intimated above, talks about a merger have been going on for a long time, and in my honest opinion this announcement is happening now because it was not going to be possible for the WiMedia Alliance to go it alone for much longer.

And secondly, there is the reasoning that both the WiMedia Alliance and the Bluetooth SIG have been stating. There is massive crossover in terms of membership between the two organisations. The Bluetooth SIG’s exec director, talking to me on Friday, suggested that 90% of WiMedia Alliance members were also Bluetooth SIG members. As Foley observed, “At any time, but especially now, it is important to be seen to make your standardisation dollars go as far as you can. “ Fair point. WiMedia president Stephen Wood, who I also talked to on Friday, said that the number of WiMedia member companies that weren’t also Bluetooth SIG members was just seven.


Will it really happen, and if not, why not?

It is safe to assume that both the Bluetooth SIG and the WiMedia boards want this to happen. The announcement wouldn’t be possible if they didn’t. But – the WiMedia Alliance doesn’t own the key UWB IP, it belongs to the members that have developed UWB, so WiMedia can’t just hand it over. And both the Bluetooth SIG and WiMedia Alliance operate under different RAND IPR models. For the Bluetooth/WiMedia merger to go beyond what is effectively a statement of intent, the WiMedia members have to agree to sign over their IP to the Bluetooth SIG. Will they do so? My guess is they probably will. Without the support of the Bluetooth SIG, they are going to have a substantially more difficult job taking the technology and their companies forward. As I’ve stated many times now, these talks have also been going on for a long time, and if any of those WiMedia companies was going to raise a storm over contributing their IP, they would probably have said so by now.


And the most worrying possibility?

That is that the Bluetooth SIG could take UWB in one direction while the Wireless USB bods could go off in another. We could have two different versions of UWB, which can’t be in the best interests of the technology. As the Bluetooth community continues to work towards using UWB as its high speed panacea, the Wireless USB companies will be working down their own road, while not necessarily in complete isolation, but certainly with a different set of goal posts, timelines etc. The words ‘death’ and ‘ knell’ spring to mind.

I mentioned this to both Foley and Wood. Foley admitted that from his organisation’s point of view, this new level of access to the WiMedia spec does provides Bluetooth developers with a new capability and a valuable advantage. “Up until now, we’ve only been able to reference the WiMedia spec, which has meant that any co-development was not necessarily best optimised for Bluetooth. Having the ‘black box’ handed over means we can open the lid and tweak things.” My forebodings of doom were somewhat allayed by both Foley and Wood suggesting that in terms of developments from this point forwards, the semiconductor companies will set the agenda, and that they wouldn’t want to be developing, building and supporting two different versions of UWB. Wood in particular pointed out the industry behemoths – the major handset companies – would not want to be dicing with non-interoperating versions of UWB.

We checked with our nearest semiconductor friends at CSR, and Gillian Ewers, Head of CSR’s Connectivity Marketing, Audio and Connectivity Business Unit commented, "CSR fully supports the merger of the WiMedia Alliance and the Bluetooth SIG which will help drive the integration of UWB technology into the high-speed Bluetooth roadmap. At Mobile World Congress in February, CSR successfully demonstrated its UWB technology transferring files at 200Mbps. CSR continues to support both Wi-Fi and WiMedia UWB variants of high-speed Bluetooth, and UWB remains a part of our Connectivity Centre proposition. CSR's Connectivity Centre applies CSR's Smart Integration techniques to combine multiple technologies and bring benefits to designers and end users."

So, everybody is saying the right things but I will admit that am not 100% convinced that there will be untroubled waters ahead.

One thing is for sure. Whichever way you look at it, what we knew as the WiMedia Alliance is disappearing. What will develop over the coming months remains to be seen, and we will of course feature further developments in Incisor, starting at the end of this month.

So, it is goodbye to WiMedia Alliance. And hello to plain sailing for UWB? Only time will tell.

And if you do want to read the whole, official release, here it is:

WiMedia Announces New Agreements with Bluetooth SIG and Wireless USB
Future specification development to build on UWB’s momentum


SAN RAMON, Calif. – March 16th, 2009 - The WiMedia Alliance announced today it is entering into technology transfer agreements for the WiMedia Ultra-wideband (UWB) specifications. WiMedia will transfer all current and future specifications, including work on future high speed and power optimized implementations, to the Bluetooth Special Interest Group (SIG), Wireless USB Promoter Group and the USB Implementers Forum. After the successful completion of the technology transfer, marketing and related administrative items, the WiMedia Alliance will cease operations.

“We have reached a point in specification development and product availability where it is more efficient for the related industry groups to oversee future specification development in-house,” said Stephen Wood, president, WiMedia Alliance. “Recent announcements of cost-effective 2nd and 3rd generation products, the availability of high-band products for worldwide use, and UWB chipsets and consumer end products from industry giant Samsung are indicative of the momentum we have gained. Our technology is already embedded in Wireless USB and we have demonstrated working prototypes running the Bluetooth protocol. It now makes sense to streamline the process by passing off future specification development and certification.”

Many of the WiMedia Alliance members are current members of one or both of the other industry groups and so a seamless transition is expected as they continue to move the specifications forward.

“We have been working with the WiMedia Alliance for a number of years and together we share members and a common desire to forward the establishment of the most efficient and cost effective wireless solutions for any environment,” said Michael Foley, Ph.D., executive director, Bluetooth Special Interest Group (SIG). “This is a natural transition and one that will streamline processes, bringing wireless products to market more quickly.”

“The Wireless USB Promoter Group and the USB-IF have worked closely with the WiMedia Alliance since its inception in support of the rapid development and adoption of Wireless USB standards and products,” said Jeff Ravencraft, USB-IF President and Chairman. “This technology transfer will provide our members with a one-stop process for certification and continued productization of Wireless USB.”

Incisor unites the WPAN factions!

We've just published the March issue of Incisor, which includes the second appearance of the Incisor WPANel. This is an group of executives brought together my Incisor to comment on topical issue within the Short Range wireless industry.

We've got all of the number one spokespersons for the various WPAN technology organisations - Mike Foley, exec director of the Bluetooth SIG, Erich Kamperschroer, chairman of the DECT Forum, Graham Martin, chairman of the EnOcean Alliance, Edgar Figueroa, executive director of the Wi-Fi Alliance, Stephen Wood, president of the WiMedia Alliance, and Bob Heile, chairman of the ZigBee Alliance.

I could be wrong, but I think this is the first time all of these guys have been brought together in this way - half the time they are at war with each other!

I think this is a great initiative and plan to develop the WPANel concept over the coming months. Anyone with any ideas as to how we could nurture the WPANel, and ways in which it could contribute, send me an email at vholton@incisor.tv