LONDON-The Bluetooth industry received a boost from a Frost & Sullivan report noting the wireless technology has progressed from its simple cable replacement origins, with different deployment models anticipated from the home and office through to specific industrial solutions and commercial environment uptake.
“We believe that there is strong growth potential in the Bluetooth network infrastructure market,” said Michael Wall, industry analyst at Frost & Sullivan. “In light of the omnipresence of Bluetooth devices, such as notebook PCs, cellular phones and PC accessories, the emphasis will be on providing software and services that take advantage of this ubiquity.”
Hall noted one market that will remain important to the uptake of Bluetooth will be access points and dedicated controllers, which will be spurred in the future by the decision of the Bluetooth Special Interest Group to double the bandwidth of the technology from its current 1 megabit per second in the next specification release.
This advancement should increase global shipments of Bluetooth access point products from 8000 units and $4 million in revenue in 2001 to more than 200,000 units and $40 million in revenues by 2006. Bluetooth access controllers and server products are also expected to increase from 1,000 and $3 million in revenues last year to 11,000 units and $11 million in revenue by 2006.
