How Bluetooth will hit 400Mbits/sec

A marriage of Bluetooth and emerging fast ultra-wideband (UWB) wireless will allow mobile devices to use even high-bandwidth local resources like media servers, according to one of the leading firms designing the technology.

The maximum real throughput of Extended Data Rate Bluetooth is about 2.Mbits/sec; but UWB can hit speeds in excess of 400Mbit/sec, easily enough for high-definition video. Bluetooth's contribution lies in its ability to find and link securely with resources.

'All the nasty work of developing all the profiles that are needed to connect to different devices has been done. The idea is that Bluetooth discovers devices in a room and then calls up UWB when necessary, said Simon Finch, vice-president of the Wifi strategic business unit at Cambridge Silicon Radio (CSR ).

'If, say, you want to transfer a large file between one machine and another at very high-speed. Bluetooth will find the machine, set-up the link, and then request the UWB part of the system to do the rest. It's like nailing up a very large pipe between the two machines.'

The idea of having a mobile device that can draw most of its resources from the network has been thrown into focus by the emergence of Origami ultra-mobile PCs (UMPC), the first true portables (as opposed to luggables) to have the full power of a desktop computer.

UWB will give the Origami links as fast as a desktop PC; but more importantly, what the UMPC lacks in size and local resources can be drawn from the local network. For instance if you want to show something on a bigger screen, you could simply tell the machine to screen it on the TV in the corner.

The dream is that you will be able to walk in the room and the mobile would tell you what resources are available to you. 'Bluetooth can do that already but it does not have the very fast data transfer,' said Finch

He was unclear how this will fit in with Universal Plug and Play (UPnP), which is designed to do something similar. 'I do know there is a Bluetooth committee working on that.'

Neither could Finch give a date when CSR would launch its UWB Bluetooth technology. Ironically this will be dictated partly by rival companies, as a product cannot be approved until it has completed interoperability tests.

But early reports suggest that the technology will not emerge until 2008.

Finch was speaking at the Wireless Event show in London, where he demonstrated improved Bluetooth and Wifi coexistence in the same device.

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