The Bluetooth SIG has finalized the Bluetooth EDR spec for three times the bandwidth, and laid out its road map for the next years of Bluetooth.
The Bluetooth Special Interest Group (SIG) has approved the long-awaited Bluetooth 2.0 + EDR specification (Enhanced Data Rate), offering three times the bandwidth of conventional Bluetooth protocols.
In development for most of the year, Bluetooth EDR alters the signal encoding system used by Bluetooth to allow it to transmit at up to 3 megabits per second, several times faster than the third of a megabit or so of conventional Bluetooth 1.1 devices, while while reducing power consumption and still maintaining backward compatibility with older products (at slower data speeds). While short data bursts really can't get much faster, that does open up the possibility for streaming audio over Bluetooth from a phone to a headset, using a 3G-capable phone as a wireless modem for a laptop, and other high-bandwidth features. Products with Bluetooth 2.0 + EDR are expected to reach shelves sometime in 2005.
The SIG also announced its roadmap for continued Bluetooth development. While focusing on throughput and power consumption in 2004 with EDR, the SIG plans to work on Quality of Service and Security issues in 2005. Those include prioritizing of devices (e.g., a Bluetooth printer can tolerate more of a delay than a Bluetooth mouse can) and more secure pairing and authentication mechanisms, as well as increasing the number of devices per "piconet" from 8 to 256 to support home security and industrial automation systems.
In 2006, the SIG hopes to focus on adding multi-cast capability to the protocol, while further improving security and performance. Multi-cast is a general term for allowing a single device to send a message to multiple other devices without simply repeating the message to each one in turn, thus saving both bandwidth and processing power. The SIG sees such mult-cast ability being useful in multiplayer gaming and when multiple Bluetooth headphones or speakers are running off of the same computer or stereo. The group also plans to try and increase the range of low-power Bluetooth transmitters to 100 meters, up from the current 10 meters for low-power devices.
The SIG plans for each phase to take approximately one year, with a new backward-compatible specification available at the end of each after a lengthy testing phase. Products supporting each new version of the protocol are expected to appear six to nine months after the specification is finalized. Whether the SIG will be able to stick to that ambitious schedule remains to be seen.
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