Great expectations
Bluetooth will be an important technology, but the industry needs to be realistic.
Maury Wright, Editor-in-Chief

For instance, a reader recently questioned why Bluetooth wasn't mentioned in a hands-on story we did on wireless LANs (see "Loosely coupled").
Well for starters, no Bluetooth products were shipping. But more significantly, Bluetooth just isn't a networking technology. It can't match true wireless LANs because it's not a multi-node technology with a robust media access controller. I expect Bluetooth to complement LANs—both wired and wireless—by allowing you to add a node to the network on an ad hoc basis. But that will only occur via a direct link to an existing client on the network.

And I haven't even mentioned Bluetooth's speed compared to wireless LAN standards like IEEE 802.11b and the even-speedier 802.11a. Bluetooth as a wireless LAN? As my son constantly says: "Yeah, right."

So let's forget about roles for which Bluetooth wasn't intended. What about fulfilling its stated applications? Here too, the hype exceeds the reality, because Bluetooth isn't nearly as close to widespread deployment as many would have you believe. In the short term, Bluetooth will clearly work within closed systems. For example, it can connect a cell phone and a hands-free headset when one manufacturer controls both ends of the link.

However, Bluetooth's ultimate promise encompasses automatic and seamless interoperation of any two enabled devices. Three huge obstacles to this promise won't disappear soon. First, the standard is young and not without holes. Early devices from different manufacturers will surely suffer incompatibilities.

Second, Bluetooth is only part of the picture. After all, do devices that are connected by wires work in concert today? Not without considerable human intervention. We'll need good service-discovery technologies and software stacks. And contenders, like Jini and Universal Plug-and-Play, are coming along slowly (check our December issue for a feature on this topic). I suspect that any-to-any device interoperability is two years away in terms of software support.

Finally, Bluetooth silicon is simply too expensive to make the technology cost-effective in low-end products. I believe that will also take two years to change.

I find it somewhat amusing that Bluetooth, on its own, merely solves the same problem as a technology that was hot a few years back—infrared connectivity. Why aren't we all using infrared today? Not because it failed to proffer a reliable data connection, but because it lacked the same interoperability features that Bluetooth lacks today.

Don't take my comments too negatively. New technologies always take longer to mature than the inevitable optimists estimate. I don't doubt that Bluetooth will be a long-enduring and vital standard. It's simply further in the future than most admit. And even then, it will do only what it's designed to do. It won't take on roles as a network, a broadband interface, or anything else beyond the scope of the spec.