10 Things you may not know about BLUETOOTH

BlueTooth is 10 years old

I am not kidding. It was back in 1998 that this wireless method was conceived by European telecommunications giant Ericsson. Ericsson along with four other companies selected the name Bluetooth and formed the Bluetooth Special Interest Group (SIG) to develop the technology. Now it is the most widely used short-range wireless technology.

Billions are sold

THERE ARE MORE BLUETOOTH RADIOS ON THE PLANET THAN ANY OTHER

Cambridge Silicon Radio — the leading Bluetooth chip supplier — shipped over 600 million chips in 2007 and is expected to ship about a billion more this year. That’s just one supplier. The total number of chips buried in other products is well over several billion. The reason for such high volume is that the number one use of Bluetooth is to implement the wireless headset in cell phones. That means two Bluetooth chips for each: one in the handset and the other in the ear piece. Most cell phones have this feature today. And since cell phones sell in the one billion per year range, you can see how Bluetooth got to be number one. There are dozens of other uses, as well. ABI Research — a market information company — predicts that about 2.4 billion Bluetooth-enabled products will ship in 2013.