One more thing about Bluetooth 3.0…
Well, if you’ve heard any of the news, press releases, or blog postings about Bluetooth 3.0, then you should be as excited as I am about this stuff. It’s nicknamed Bluetooth 10x for a reason; we’re talking about sending your data at 24 Mb/s! However, some folks are a little confused about how all this stuff works, so please allow me to explain a few concepts.
First of all, let’s take a look at some wireless standards (you’re probably familiar with the first one):
- 802.11
- 802.15.1
- 802.15.4
So, in the past decade, the IEEE standards body came together, designed, and formed all of the wireless standards listed above. Now, Wi-Fi is a brand name of *an* implementation of 802.11 wireless standard. Wi-Fi is such a common brand name, it is synonymous as the only implementation of the 802.11 standard. But that’s not the case.
The same things goes for Bluetooth. Bluetooth is an implementation of the 802.15.1 wireless standard, but it is not necessarily the only implementation. Likewise, this pattern applies to ZigBee. The SunSpot wireless devices natively communicate over the 802.15.4 wireless protocol, but they do NOT implement the ZigBee protocol stack.
So here’s what you can expect in the new Bluetooth 3.0 devices that will be coming next year. Bluetooth 3.0 devices will be able to discover and search for services for remote Bluetooth 3.0, 2.1, 2.0, 1.1, and 1.0 devices. However, if both devices support Bluetooth 3.0, then when the data payload is being sent, the data will be sent over the 802.11 “channel” and not the 802.15.1 “channel”.
I hope this makes sense.