The Marriage of Communication and Computing

Imagine that you are in a meeting with your notebook computer open in front of you. Suddenly, the cursor begins to blink and a new e-mail message is displayed on the screen. Your computer isn't plugged into anything, your cellular phone is in your briefcase under the table, but you are receiving e-mail over the wireless network. How is this possible?

Over the past ten years, the communications and computer industries have developed new technology products that enable mobile workers to be more productive. As a result, our work force is able to spend more working hours in the field.

Today's mobile workers number some 45 million in the United States alone. They've gone from simple beepers to lightweight mobile phones; from 30-pound luggables to 5-ounce pocketable PCs. The devices are lighter and more powerful, but they're still separate devices with limited ability to work together to support the mobile worker's need to access their own e-mail, connect to their corporate information resources, and perhaps to send and receive faxes. Palmtops and mobile phones alone are no longer enough.

The merger of computing and communications

The computing and communications industries have been working together for the last five or six years to provide mobile workers with the same level of access to their computing data as they have to people via their mobile voice phones. Wireless networks originally developed for voice communications have been expanded to serve as wireless data pipes. Further, in more than a dozen countries including the United States, data-only wireless networks have been built and put into service.

Fortunately, the new wireless voice systems being implemented today are based on digital technologies, as are the existing data-only networks. In addition, most of the older analog wireless networks are being upgraded to digital. Digital networks are better suited to data, and most are capable of providing both voice and data communications.

With the recent success of palmtop and handheld computers, as well as the emergence of a new generation of still smaller and lighter mobile computers, there is renewed interest within the computing community for wireless data access. But implementing wireless data remains a complex and expensive proposition. Because the many wide-area networks and many different digital standards, computer vendors have been frustrated in their efforts to build wireless communications solutions into their mobile computers. Communications companies have had to find ways to enable their communications devices in the computing world. They've developed a number of solutions, each with it's own set of problems.

The communications industry has been trying to find a solution that would enable mobile computing devices to connect to their wireless networks. Computer companies have been trying to find a way to connect their devices to wireless networks. While they share the same goal, each industry has been focusing on its own technology without adequate consideration of the requirements of the other.

At Long Last: Bluetooth!

Eventually, companies from both industries decided that they needed to work together to find a common solution. They knew that there was a demand to merge mobile computing with mobile communications, and they understood the problems.

The result of their collaboration will be a technology code-named "Bluetooth." Rather than trying to design computers so they will work with any wireless interface card or modem on any frequency, using any one of a number of digital technologies, they decided to design a single, common radio that could be built into every mobile computer?

The computer and radio combination could then be optimized to minimize interference -- a task made easier for computer engineers with only one radio. And with a single-radio solution, computer vendors are no longer faced with having to make a network choice or supporting multiple networks.

The Bluetooth communications device is a small, low-powered radio on a microchip. It "talks" to other Bluetooth-enabled products, eliminating the need for cables or infrared beams to connect portable computers, cellular phones, printers, fax machines, etc. Bluetooth will make it possible to connect enabled devices on a one-to-one or one-to-many basis.