The Bluetooth standard for wireless connectivity is now being sold to companies as an adjunct to 802.11b wireless LANs (WLANs) and wide area wireless networks (WANs). The reasoning is that mobile client devices will need some way to connect to local devices as well as corporate infrastructure. Vendors are therefore integrating Bluetooth alongside other wireless standards while trying to avoid any interference problems.
At the Bluetooth Developers Conference in San Francisco last week, US communications specialist Bandspeed and its software partner Open Interface unveiled a jointly developed chipset that enables Bluetooth devices to coexist with WLANs that use the 802.11b wireless standard. The transceiver uses adaptive frequency hopping techniques to discover free space on the 2.4GHz band in which Bluetooth and 802.11b devices operate.
The transceiver chipset uses a radio chip from National Semiconductor, and should be available in products in the second half of next year, according to Bandspeed.
Meanwhile, wireless systems company Mobilian plans to release its TrueRadio chipset in the second half of next year, designed to support 802.11b and Bluetooth simultaneously.
Bandspeed's chief executive, Michael Luther, said the difference between the Mobilian and Bandspeed chipsets concerns the issue of collaborative versus non-collaborative operation.
'[With TrueRadio] we do not require the Bluetooth baseband to collaborate with the WiFi [802.11b] baseband,' Luther commented. 'There is no communication between the two. The Bluetooth device just avoids interference with the wireless LAN.'
IT professionals agreed that solutions are needed to avoid interference problems. 'If I had a Bluetooth phone and a Bluetooth PDA that were always connected for exchanging contact information, but if at the same time that PDA had an 802.11 connection for email, then the two standards would have to work together,' said Jorge Abellas-Martin, chief information officer at US advertising company Arnold Worldwide.
There is another reason why some systems with Bluetooth and 802.11b may not be able to use them together Ã, especially if they were designed for the US market.
Toshiba's Portégé 4000 notebook has been deliberately designed not to use both standards together because of US Federal Communications Commission regulations on electromagnetic emissions. It is not clear whether new chipsets are being designed to avoid this difficulty.
Bluetooth connectivity is also being incorporated into a number of mobile phone designs and other small devices, which will have to work with third-generation mobile phone technologies.
Silicon Wave of San Diego demonstrated two radio modems at the Bluetooth conference: one works in conjunction with Code Division Multiple Access (CDMA) chipsets; the other works in conjunction with Global System for Mobile communications (GSM).
On the developer front, Extended Systems announced that its software development kit, XtndAccess Blue SDK, now supports the new Bluetooth printer profile, a long-awaited feature in the Bluetooth specification that enables wireless printing.
The mobile technology company also demonstrated XtndAccess SyncML SDK, which enables developers to incorporate the SyncML synchronisation protocol into mobile communication devices.
Wireless technology specialist Red-M announced products focusing on the needs of commercial networks and companies with large mobile sales forces. the firm demonstrated a mixed 802.11 WLAN and Bluetooth network with security provided by its Genos wireless middleware.
