The Bluetooth Special Interest Group (SIG) today announced its intent to work with the developers of the wireless technology commonly known as Ultra-wideband (UWB) to combine strengths of both technologies.

This decision will allow Bluetooth technology to extend its long-term roadmap to meet the high-speed demands of synchronizing and transferring large amounts of data as well as enabling high quality video applications for portable devices.

While details are still being worked out, the goal is to work towards an architecture that allows devices to take advantage of UWB data rates for scenarios that require high speed. Bluetooth will still be important to maintain backward compatibly with existing devices on the market and future products not requiring the higher data rate.

Advantages for Bluetooth wireless technology
With this collaborative approach, it will be possible to maintain existing Bluetooth core values like low power, low cost and unique ad hoc connectivity while enabling future usage scenarios requiring higher data throughput. Such an example would be streaming high quality video between portable devices. As digital content size increases, the bit rate required to move data from device to device increases. As such, a classic Bluetooth usage scenario today of exchanging a file is more likely to require UWB speeds in the future.