Mass Bluetooth use is years away
InfoWorld | at | by Mike
MASS use of Bluetooth for short-range wireless communication is years away. The technology's backers hyped Bluetooth and, back in reality, now predict that it will be eight years before Bluetooth is as commonly used as a mobile phone is today. "We did overheat it a lot," said Mike McCamon, executive director of the Bluetooth Special Interest Group (SIG), in an interview at the fourth annual Bluetooth Congress that ended here on Friday. The Bluetooth SIG trade association comprises hundreds of organizations working on Bluetooth products and applications.
Bluetooth was invented in 1994 as a cable replacement technology. It offers data transfer rates of about 400Kbps and operates in the 2.4GHz frequency band, the same as many cordless telephones and 802.11b wireless LAN technology. Vendors predicted that Bluetooth would be everywhere by now, but the number of devices with Bluetooth support remains limited and early adopters are the only ones using Bluetooth today.