Business Today Net Special

The Wireless Wonder

By Ashutosh Sinha

Circa 2005: It's half past seven in the evening, and you are going home back from work. You pull into the driveway, and the sensors on your car automatically instruct the garage door to open. You climb out of the car and head for the main door, which picks up a signal from your electronic key to open. It's a hot evening outside, but inside your home it's a pleasant 16 degree celsius because your house "knew" you were coming and had automatically switched on the lights and the air-conditioner. The coffee pot is on, too, and you've just asked your voice-activated mobile-phone headset to call your wife and check her ETA. That done, you go into your study room and without plugging any cable from your PDA to your PC, you click a button and the entire day's new phone numbers and addresses are uploaded on to your desktop computer.

Futuristic? Yes. Fiction? No.

Ten centuries after Harald Bluetooth, a Danish King, unified Norway and Denmark, his namesake technology is all set to unify communication between electronic devices. Launched in May 1998, by a consortium of five hi-tech companies---Ericsson, IBM, Intel, Nokia, and Toshiba---the Bluetooth standard will use short-range radio link to enable a range of equipment including mobile phones, printers, hands-free headsets, modems, desktop PCs, Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs), and wireless Local Area Network (LAN) devices to communicate to each other. Today, if you want to transfer any data from your PDA to your PC, you have to plug the two using cables. Tomorrow, Bluetooth chips in such devices will keep channels of communication always on, allowing them to talk to each other whenever they are within a range of less than 100 metres.

What's different about Bluetooth is that it operates out of the network environment and communicates at the appliance level. Just like infra-red enables a remote controller to communicates specific commands to a television, bluetooth will use radio signals to communicate. The advantage with bluetooth is that there are no line of sight constraints. You could be in a different room, and still switch on your burglar alarm before going to bed.

Ericsson recently launched the T-36, billed to be the first Bluetooth-enabled mobile phone in the world. Next in the pipeline is the R-520, the GPRS (General Packet Radio Service) and Bluetooth-enabled phone to be launched later this year. Alcatel, similarly, is to market its Bluetooth phone over the next few months. Says Vinod Sood, Head of Engineering, Hughes Software Systems: "The first applications of the technology that you can see in perhaps a year or so will be the replacement of wires."

To popularise bluetooth and hasten its market acceptance, the consortium has decided to keep the standards open. Which means software companies will be able to launch new products based on the bluetooth standards. In fact, the real money in the bluetooth business will lie in tapping the electronic devices market. Companies that can embed the Bluetooth devices are likely to be the biggest beneficiaries in the immediate future. Whether it is large companies like Hughes Software Systems (HSS) or start-ups like Bangalore-based Impulsesoft, they are looking at capturing the market that enables the technology.

HSS, for example, is concentrating on enabling the software underlying the technology. It has already developed the Bluetooth stack that is designed in such a manner that it is free of the hardware or the operating software. Says Sood of HSS: "We are approaching companies that manufacture the chips and sell licence the software for being embedded in the chip." The devices into which these chips are placed become "intelligent".

The approach of Impulsesoft is no different. It has identified real time operating systems (RTOS), personal digital assistants (PDAs), and OEMs as the areas that it would focus to build applications around. Already, its first product, a PC-based solution is scheduled to roll out in Europe during Christmas this year. Says Bikash Chowdhury, Strategic Marketing Manager, Impulsesoft: "The Indian market is still not ready for Bluetooth. (However,) Impulsesoft is looking at consumer appliances market as one of the potential area for showcasing its technology."

The devices may be slow in coming. But they sure will be worth waiting for. Doubt it? Take the three-in-one phone, for example. At home, your phone will work like a cordless phone using the land line. When you are moving, it will switch itself to the mobile mode (you'll pay whatever the airtime rate is). But if your standing across the street from your friend and can't yell, use the phone. Only this time, there will be no call charge, because the two phones will work like walkie-talkies.

Bet, the Viking King had no clue what his name could do.

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