| I was involved in the 1.0 Bluetooth specifications and can confirm it was "designed by committee". IIRC the original wireless specification came from either Nokia or Ericsson and they drove a lot of the initial development. They had already developed the RF technology before the Bluetooth SIG was even formed. The original stated goal for Bluetooth was "cable replacement". Features such as pairing a headset to a phone, or a phone to a laptop were an essential part of the original profiles. A reason for the complexity was that the BT 1.0 profiles often leveraged existing technology, for example: - RFCOMM was a way of sending arbitrary serial data, reusing RS232 comms which were very common. - OBEX was a way of sending data which was previously sent over IrDA - The "LAN access profile" basically said "use RFCOMM to do PPP over a serial link like you do with a modem" If you tried to implement any of these from scratch then not only do you have to implement the BT part, you also have to implement the technologies that BT reused. If you look at the initial SIG members, Nokia and Ericsson took care of the initial phone developments. Intel, IBM, Microsoft and Toshiba represented the PC side of things. I was working for 3Com at the time and we were interested in it as a short range network technology. 3Com developed a network device conforming to the "LAN access profile" but it was never released. 3Com also owned Palm and they were interested in incorporating BT with the hand held devices. It is interesting to compare BT to Wireless Ethernet (IEEE 802.11) world. The IEEE Ethernet (802.3) specifications are pretty much only concerned with getting data packets from A to B at layers 0 through 2. At layer 3 and above they don't care if those packets are IPv4, IPv6 or some other protocol like IPX. Bluetooth tried to define everything from the the RF communications all the way up to the application layer. The specification mentions how to the PIN code request should be presented to the user when authorizing a new connection. It also mentions which audio codecs should be supported for streaming audio. The BT profiles also tried to define how to transfer files, business cards or print documents. These detailed application layer specifications simply don't exist in something like Ethernet. There might be an argument that BT tried to over specify things but it was attempting to give a level of interoperability which we still struggle to achieve over other networks. |