6 ms·

I don't see why Bluetooth took off and wusb didn't. It must have something to do with marketing.

shahzaibmushtaq 1y ago
yes-and-no. In my opinion, this was the timing and usefulness of Bluetooth in an era when only Nokia ruled the world. Moreover, there are many other reasons too.
designerarvid 1y ago
Largest phone manufacturers of the time (Ericsson and Nokia) supporting and developing it surely helped.
msh 1y ago
Bluetooth took off before wireless usb did and was allready useful to people when wusb came a long. It was also lower power so you could do peripherals that was smaller and longer lived.
phire 1y ago
Bluetooth had some early success in cellphones, mostly to support Bluetooth headsets and car radio integration, starting from about 1999. It could do other things, but the wireless headset was the killer app in its early days. Bluetooth didn’t really hit mainstream until the arrival of chipsets that multiplexed Bluetooth and WiFi on the same radio+antenna. My memory is that happened sometime around 2007-2010. At that point, the BOM cost to add Bluetooth to a laptop or smart device became essentially zero, why not include it? Modern smartphones with both Bluetooth and Wifi arrived at around the same time (I suspect these combo chipsets were originally developed for handheld devices, and laptops benefited) And once Bluetooth was mainstream, we saw a steady rise in devices using Bluetooth. WUSB operates on a completely different set of frequencies and technology and couldn’t share hardware with WiFi. Maybe it could have taken off if there was a killer app, but there never was.
- mort96 1y ago
  At this point, the decision to add Bluetooth or not is literally just a product decision. If you don't want Bluetooth in your product, you actively have to disable the Bluetooth part of your WiFi chip, because you can't really get a WiFi chip without Bluetooth.
  - brookst 1y ago
    All of the BT+wifi chips I’ve worked with require active initialization of each feature; you have to signal the chip (over i2c or SPI or whatever) with what kind of BT operations you want. No BT stack in your product, no BT radio initialization, no BT/wifi multiplexing. At least in the (admittedly limited) chips I’ve worked with.
- miki123211 1y ago
  > the wireless headset was the killer app in its early days Don't forget music piracy. At least over here, a lot of kids had phones that did Bluetooth, and the primary use case for it was sharing songs they liked with each other. You could use infrared (IRDA) for that, and some people did before Bluetooth was common, but it was much slower. This was mostly on low-end Nokias, maybe with a bit of Sony Ericsson thrown into the mix. They definitely did not have WiFi, in fact, Nokia even tried to limit internet over Bluetooth for usual carrier monopoly reasons as far as I'm aware, but Bluetooth was definitely there. For many here, the iPhone not doing file and ringtone sharing over Bluetooth was one of its main limitations, at least early on. It was a social network in its own way, and having a device that couldn't participate in it was no fun.
  - palata 1y ago
    > Don't forget music piracy. What you describe is file sharing, not necessarily piracy :-). Just nitpicking, I understand what you mean of course!
  - rikafurude21 1y ago
    Wow this unlocked a bunch of memories from middle school where we would send each other the latest songs and games via bluetooth. I remember pirating games for my sony ericsson and sharing them with my friends and we would play these games in class. You could just share and install the .jar files. Good times
hnlmorg 1y ago
Back when Bluetooth was new, the alternative for wirelessly sharing data between mobile devices like phones was infrared. IR was exceptionally slow, required line-of-sight and even at the time, felt like a shitty solution. So even though the early implementations of Bluetooth also left a lot to be desired (battery hungry, insecure, and also slow), it was still a massive improvement on what came before. Wireless USB wasn’t a significant enough improvement to Bluetooth given that BT was already ubiquitous by that point, but also cheap and (by that point) battery efficient now too.
- m4rtink 1y ago
  IR with palm devices was super nice - just point to the other device and send, then confirm on the other. No persistent pairing bullshit & you could also use it to control TVs.
  - hnlmorg 1y ago
    That’s how BT originally worked too but it got abused (I touched on this in my original comment when I said BT was insecure). The paring is a security measure to protect people from abuse. Back when BT was new, I used to get all sorts of random shit pushed onto my phone every Friday night on the drunk train home from London.
    - miki123211 1y ago
      I guess that was a lot less of a problem with IRDA as it required line-of-sight, which limited the abuse potential significantly. Some devices would even establish an IRDA connection automatically as soon as they found anything. I have friends whose laptop names have suddenly appeared on lecture room projectors, as their laptop's IRDA receiver was in direct line of sight of that of the teacher's. Not that you couldn't do that with Bluetooth, some early BT chipsets gave you a "<device name> wants to connect to you" dialog box any time somebody tried sending something to your device. This could be abused, to great student amusement, to display funny messages on that same projector if the lecturer's laptop had such a chipset.
- 1y ago
torginus 1y ago
Introducing a new wireless protocol is incredibly difficult. You basically have to have all the countries in the world to give you a chunk of their spectrum. You have 2 mainstream protocols now, one for low energy, slow data transfers (Bluetooth) and one for fast, but more power hungry devices. I don't see the usecase for UWB.
- BenjiWiebe 1y ago
  And as far as I know, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth didn't have frequency given to them. They instead used frequencies that were already available for unlicensed use.
greatgib 1y ago
In my opinion, for computers, wireless mouse (and eventually keyboards) was one of the killer app that showed pushed for Bluetooth to be common in computers and laptops. "Not needing a dongle" was a huge added value compared to the private radio protocol of manufacturers
GuB-42 1y ago
My guess is just that Bluetooth and Wi-Fi came first, and when wireless USB entered the party, there wasn't a real need for it, as most of its use cases were already covered by Bluetooth and Wi-Fi. It maybe could have worked with better marketing, but convincing potential customers to change something that works (somewhat, BT wasn't without issues) is hard. That's why we are keeping abominations like cigarette lighter sockets in cars even though they often can't even light cigarettes anymore. It is already well established and it works well enough as a power outlet.
adrr 1y ago
Bluetooth took off because it was easiest path to do wireless headsets when handsfree driving laws passed.
rajnathani 1y ago
Maybe the low-power feature of Bluetooth helped it, such as with the Bluetooth LE (Low Energy) spec that with the way "services" and "characteristics" are defined that it allows for extremely low power consumption when no read-operation is done and thus the Bluetooth radio power can be minimized. Also, the 2.4 GHz band of Bluetooth is inherently less power consuming than the higher frequency band of Wireless USB. But I guess the other problems may have been due to as the OP article brings up about it being in a different frequency communication band. Bluetooth on the other hand shares the same frequency band as Wi-Fi (2.4 GHz (which is also the OG Wi-Fi frequency band)). Thus for PC and mobile device OEMs, it is one less antenna to integrate. Furthermore, the higher frequency of the band would have made through-walls and further-distance communication less reliable. In this context, one of the few cool applications of wireless USB would've been a wireless keyboard or mouse (but this is coming from someone who is working on an OEM computer keyboard and mouse).

yes-and-no. In my opinion, this was the timing and usefulness of Bluetooth in an era when only Nokia ruled the world. Moreover, there are many other reasons too.

designerarvid 1y ago

Largest phone manufacturers of the time (Ericsson and Nokia) supporting and developing it surely helped.

msh 1y ago

Bluetooth took off before wireless usb did and was allready useful to people when wusb came a long. It was also lower power so you could do peripherals that was smaller and longer lived.

phire 1y ago

Bluetooth had some early success in cellphones, mostly to support Bluetooth headsets and car radio integration, starting from about 1999. It could do other things, but the wireless headset was the killer app in its early days. Bluetooth didn’t really hit mainstream until the arrival of chipsets that multiplexed Bluetooth and WiFi on the same radio+antenna. My memory is that happened sometime around 2007-2010. At that point, the BOM cost to add Bluetooth to a laptop or smart device became essentially zero, why not include it? Modern smartphones with both Bluetooth and Wifi arrived at around the same time (I suspect these combo chipsets were originally developed for handheld devices, and laptops benefited) And once Bluetooth was mainstream, we saw a steady rise in devices using Bluetooth. WUSB operates on a completely different set of frequencies and technology and couldn’t share hardware with WiFi. Maybe it could have taken off if there was a killer app, but there never was.

mort96 1y ago
At this point, the decision to add Bluetooth or not is literally just a product decision. If you don't want Bluetooth in your product, you actively have to disable the Bluetooth part of your WiFi chip, because you can't really get a WiFi chip without Bluetooth.
- brookst 1y ago
  All of the BT+wifi chips I’ve worked with require active initialization of each feature; you have to signal the chip (over i2c or SPI or whatever) with what kind of BT operations you want. No BT stack in your product, no BT radio initialization, no BT/wifi multiplexing. At least in the (admittedly limited) chips I’ve worked with.
miki123211 1y ago
> the wireless headset was the killer app in its early days Don't forget music piracy. At least over here, a lot of kids had phones that did Bluetooth, and the primary use case for it was sharing songs they liked with each other. You could use infrared (IRDA) for that, and some people did before Bluetooth was common, but it was much slower. This was mostly on low-end Nokias, maybe with a bit of Sony Ericsson thrown into the mix. They definitely did not have WiFi, in fact, Nokia even tried to limit internet over Bluetooth for usual carrier monopoly reasons as far as I'm aware, but Bluetooth was definitely there. For many here, the iPhone not doing file and ringtone sharing over Bluetooth was one of its main limitations, at least early on. It was a social network in its own way, and having a device that couldn't participate in it was no fun.
- palata 1y ago
  > Don't forget music piracy. What you describe is file sharing, not necessarily piracy :-). Just nitpicking, I understand what you mean of course!
- rikafurude21 1y ago
  Wow this unlocked a bunch of memories from middle school where we would send each other the latest songs and games via bluetooth. I remember pirating games for my sony ericsson and sharing them with my friends and we would play these games in class. You could just share and install the .jar files. Good times

hnlmorg 1y ago

Back when Bluetooth was new, the alternative for wirelessly sharing data between mobile devices like phones was infrared. IR was exceptionally slow, required line-of-sight and even at the time, felt like a shitty solution. So even though the early implementations of Bluetooth also left a lot to be desired (battery hungry, insecure, and also slow), it was still a massive improvement on what came before. Wireless USB wasn’t a significant enough improvement to Bluetooth given that BT was already ubiquitous by that point, but also cheap and (by that point) battery efficient now too.

m4rtink 1y ago
IR with palm devices was super nice - just point to the other device and send, then confirm on the other. No persistent pairing bullshit & you could also use it to control TVs.
- hnlmorg 1y ago
  That’s how BT originally worked too but it got abused (I touched on this in my original comment when I said BT was insecure). The paring is a security measure to protect people from abuse. Back when BT was new, I used to get all sorts of random shit pushed onto my phone every Friday night on the drunk train home from London.
  - miki123211 1y ago
    I guess that was a lot less of a problem with IRDA as it required line-of-sight, which limited the abuse potential significantly. Some devices would even establish an IRDA connection automatically as soon as they found anything. I have friends whose laptop names have suddenly appeared on lecture room projectors, as their laptop's IRDA receiver was in direct line of sight of that of the teacher's. Not that you couldn't do that with Bluetooth, some early BT chipsets gave you a "<device name> wants to connect to you" dialog box any time somebody tried sending something to your device. This could be abused, to great student amusement, to display funny messages on that same projector if the lecturer's laptop had such a chipset.
1y ago

torginus 1y ago

Introducing a new wireless protocol is incredibly difficult. You basically have to have all the countries in the world to give you a chunk of their spectrum. You have 2 mainstream protocols now, one for low energy, slow data transfers (Bluetooth) and one for fast, but more power hungry devices. I don't see the usecase for UWB.

BenjiWiebe 1y ago
And as far as I know, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth didn't have frequency given to them. They instead used frequencies that were already available for unlicensed use.

greatgib 1y ago

In my opinion, for computers, wireless mouse (and eventually keyboards) was one of the killer app that showed pushed for Bluetooth to be common in computers and laptops. "Not needing a dongle" was a huge added value compared to the private radio protocol of manufacturers

GuB-42 1y ago

My guess is just that Bluetooth and Wi-Fi came first, and when wireless USB entered the party, there wasn't a real need for it, as most of its use cases were already covered by Bluetooth and Wi-Fi. It maybe could have worked with better marketing, but convincing potential customers to change something that works (somewhat, BT wasn't without issues) is hard. That's why we are keeping abominations like cigarette lighter sockets in cars even though they often can't even light cigarettes anymore. It is already well established and it works well enough as a power outlet.

adrr 1y ago

Bluetooth took off because it was easiest path to do wireless headsets when handsfree driving laws passed.

rajnathani 1y ago

Maybe the low-power feature of Bluetooth helped it, such as with the Bluetooth LE (Low Energy) spec that with the way "services" and "characteristics" are defined that it allows for extremely low power consumption when no read-operation is done and thus the Bluetooth radio power can be minimized. Also, the 2.4 GHz band of Bluetooth is inherently less power consuming than the higher frequency band of Wireless USB. But I guess the other problems may have been due to as the OP article brings up about it being in a different frequency communication band. Bluetooth on the other hand shares the same frequency band as Wi-Fi (2.4 GHz (which is also the OG Wi-Fi frequency band)). Thus for PC and mobile device OEMs, it is one less antenna to integrate. Furthermore, the higher frequency of the band would have made through-walls and further-distance communication less reliable. In this context, one of the few cool applications of wireless USB would've been a wireless keyboard or mouse (but this is coming from someone who is working on an OEM computer keyboard and mouse).