The Bluetooth Special Interest Group

As previously described, Bluetooth wireless communication is embodied as a technology specification. This specification is a result of the cooperation of many companies within an organization called the Bluetooth Special Interest Group, or SIG. There is no "Bluetooth headquarters"; until 2001 there was no "Bluetooth corporation" or any sort of legally incorporated entity. Originally, the SIG was governed by legal agreements among the member parties but it was not a company unto itself. In February 2001, the SIG incorporated and is now officially known as the Bluetooth Special Interest Group, Inc. The SIG should not be construed as a formal standards body; rather it is an organization chartered to define and promote the technology. In fulfilling this charter, the SIG depends upon the contributions and participation of its member companies. Clearly a major task of the SIG has been to develop the specification, but other SIG activities include joint work with other consortia and standards and regulatory bodies, educational and promotional events such as developers' conferences and the definition of a testing and certification process.

Technology and SIG Origins

Bluetooth wireless technology was conceived by engieers at Swedish telecommunications manufacturer Telefonaktiebolaget LM Ericsson (hereafter, Ericsson) who realized the potential of global short-range wireless communications. In 1994 Ericsson had begun a project to study the feasibility of a low-power, low-cost radio interface to eliminate cables between mobile phones and their accessories.

In today's computing and communications industries, proprietary new technologies rarely succeed; customers clearly prefer to purchase and deploy technologies based on industry standards. By creating a level playing field, standards give customers greater freedom to choose from among competing platforms and solutions, to protect their investments as technologies evolve and to leverage (and in some cases, also influence) multicompany skills and organizations devoted to developing the standards.

In this industry environment, the Ericsson inventors understood that the technology was more likely to be widely accepted, and thus could be more powerful, if it was adopted and refined by an industry group that could produce an open, common specification. In early 1998, leading companies in the computing and telecommunication industries formed the Bluetooth SIG to focus on developing exactly such an open specification. The founding companies of the SIG are Ericsson, Intel Corporation, International Business Machines Corporation (IBM), Nokia Corporation and Toshiba Corporation. These companies formed the original core group (known as promoter companies) of the SIG. The SIG was publicly announced in May 1998 with a charter to produce an open specification for hardware and software that would promote interoperable, cross-platform implementations for all kinds of devices.

Although open standards can be quite advantageous, one potential disadvantage of standards bodies, consortia, special interest groups and similar organizations is that they tend toward inherent inefficiencies as compared to single-company efforts. Within a single company there is often one overriding objective for developing new technology; in a multi-company effort each participant may have different, perhaps even competing goals. Even with modern ways to exchange information, such as electronic mail, group interactions are still likely to be more efficient within a single organization than throughout a group composed of many organizations (especially when those organizations are geographically diverse, as is the case for the members of the SIGtelephone calls, for example, have to take into account the fact that the people involved reside in time zones with little or no overlap of typical working [or even waking] hours). To overcome some of these potential drawbacks, the SIG intentionally was created with a small number of companies committed to the rapid development of the specification who were willing to expend the resources necessary to accomplish this.

SIG Progression

As the specification evolved and awareness of the technology and the SIG increased, many other companies joined the SIG as adopters; adopters are entitled to a royalty-free license to produce products with Bluetooth wireless communication based on the specification and can receive and comment upon early versions of SIG publications. Today there are more than 2,400 adopter members of the SIG, representing academia and industries such as consumer electronics, automotive, silicon manufacturing, consulting, telecommunications and many others. The original objective of the SIG was to develop, as rapidly as possible, an open specification that was sufficiently complete to enable implementations. By carefully organizing the SIG and making use of frequent in-person meetings supplemented by even more frequent conference calls and e-mail exchanges, the SIG produced a thorough specification (together, the volume 1 core specification and volume 2 profiles number over 1,500 pages) in about one and one-half years (version 1.0 of the specification, including profiles, was published in July 1999).

• Initially, the SIG organized itself into several working groups, each with a focus on a specific part of the technology or on some supporting service. These working groups included:
• the air interface working group, which focused on the radio and baseband layers;
• the software working group, which developed the specification for the protocol stack;
• the interoperability working group, which focused on profiles;
• the compliance working group, which defined the testing, compliance and certification process;
• the legal working group, which managed the legal affairs of the SIG such as membership and intellectual property agreements;
• and the marketing working group, which promoted the technology and helped to generate the marketing requirements that the specification was to address.

Some of the larger working groups, such as the software working group, were further divided into task forces focusing on a particular layer of the Bluetooth protocol stack. Coordinating all of these working groups and governing the overall SIG was a program management committee composed of voting representatives from each of the promoter companies.

During the one and one-half years that the SIG was developing the version 1.0 specification, working groups and task forces met and conducted their business both together and separately. Full working group (and sometimes complete SIG) meetings were held every few weeks, often hosted by promoter companies in locations where many of their involved personnel worked. These included Ericsson's Lund, Sweden facility; Intel's Chandler, Arizona software laboratory; IBM's sites in Research Triangle Park, North Carolina and Hawthorne, New York; and Nokia's Tampere, Finland location. Most working groups and task forces also held weekly conference calls. In addition, e-mail distribution lists were used liberally and in fact were a primary method for conducting working group business. Because of the geographic diversity of the people involved, it was difficult to find mutually convenient times for frequent voice conversations;3 thus electronic mail quickly became a convenient and heavily used means of communication (in many respects it allowed specification development around the clock). Indeed, the official ratification of the final versions of the specification, profiles and errata was conducted using the e-mail reflectors.

In December 1999, four new promoter companies (3Com Corporation, Lucent Technologies Inc., Microsoft Corporation and Motorola, Inc., some of whom had made contributions to the original specification as adopter companies) joined the SIG. At that time the SIG was reorganized, adding a membership level called an associate member as well as formalizing the structure of the SIG and the specification development process. Today the SIG has several working groups, each with its own charter, along with a Bluetooth Architecture Review Board (BARB) that oversees the specification development and maintenance process. The group remains very active today in maintaining the existing documentation and in creating enhancements to the specification, along with new profiles. This work is discussed in further detail in Part 5 of this book.

It easily can be seen that it took an enormous effort to develop over 1,500 pages of complex and detailed information in just over a year's time. For many in the SIG this became their full-time job or at least a primary responsibility. Issues, both technical and non-technical, inevitably arose and were handled through discussion and voting when necessary, but in general the development and refinement of specifications and profiles progressed in an exemplary manner. A spirit of cooperation, fostered by the common objective of producing an open specification for this important new technology, usually carried the day (at least in the authors' experience in the software and interoperability working groups).