Nokia’s (News - Alert) newly proposed wireless standard dubbed “WiBree” designed to extend local connectivity to small devices has already sparked a great amount of debate and confusion.

 

Unveiled as part of Tuesday’s media blitz to commemorate the 20^th anniversary of the Nokia Research Center, Nokia's corporate research unit, the new radio technology is designed as a complement to other local connectivity technologies like Bluetooth. Nokia believes Wibree is the first open technology to offer connectivity between mobile devices and PCs or small, button-cell battery-powered devices such as watches, wireless keyboards, toys and sports sensors.

 

But unlike Bluetooth, though, WiBree offers better power consumption performance at lower throughput. WiBree has up to 1 Mbps of bandwidth at a range within 10 meters, compared with the 3 Mbps for Bluetooth. Nearly everyone from investors to bloggers seized upon that as a possibility that WiBree could in fact be a  “Bluetooth killer.”

 

“One of the interesting things is that it's a Bluetooth killer and I don't think that's going to happen,” explained Stuart Carlaw, principal analyst at ABI Research (News - Alert).

 

With the goal of bringing the first interoperable, commercial version of the specification to market by the second quarter of 2007, the group defining the spec includes Broadcom (News - Alert), CSR, Epson and Nordic Semiconductor in addition to Nokia.

 

Yet, despite the facts, the stock price of CSR, which along with Broadcom is the world’s largest supplier of Bluetooth integrated circuits (IC), plunged yesterday in London trading and is only now starting to recover in Wednesday trading. And Deutsche Bank analyst John van Steenberghe directly attributed that to misconceptions that WiBree will replace Bluetooth.

 

“We see very limited canabilisation risk for Bluetooth from WiBree…should WiBree eventually take off as a standard,” van Steenberghe said in a research note.

 

The Deutsche Bank analyst concluded that because the technology is targeted at ultra low power portable devices, it could represent more of an application overlap with ZigBee than Bluetooth. But even that assumption is too early to call, Carlaw told TMCnet. For example, in the field of home automation, WiBree could serve as an interface with home entertainment systems while ZigBee still controls lighting.

 

To be sure, Carlaw believes WiBree is better positioned because it can definitely take advantage of Bluetooth’s installed base. In speaking with Nokia officials and the Bluetooth SIG, Carlaw said the only thing to enable a Bluetooth IC to communicate with a WiBree IC is a new firmware upgrade. Both technologies use the same modulation schemes in the 2.4 GHz spectrum.

 

“It's a 100-percent symbiotic relationship,” he said during a brief telephone interview.

 

In addition to home automation, WiBree (which Carlaw has jokingly referred to as Bluetooth Lite) is also well suited for the field of home health care. For example, it could be used to transmit data of glucose monitoring devices and other essential health care needs. That could be especially relevant given last week’s decision by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC (News - Alert)) to establish a pilot program to bring advanced telecommunications and information services technologies to enhance rural health care.

 

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Robert Liu is Executive Editor at TMCnet. Previously, he was Executive Editor at Jupitermedia and has also written for CNN, A&E, Dow Jones and Bloomberg. For more articles, please visit Robert Liu's columnist page.