Standards Convergence

Every now and then when I'm on stage pitching Bluetooth mesh, I hear people commenting this is yet another standard. And that we have too many standards already. Which is true, but only to some extent. Multiple ways of doing things is a completely natural evolution step. In every category.

Take airliners: it took the industry almost 100 years to figure out and get to the point when the standard design of a jetliner is a 2-engine turbofan: it is hard to get down to a single engine (redundancy, thrust symmetry) and anything more than two brings efficiency down. B747s and A380s are the designs of the past. Widebody models will be narrowed down to A350s, B777s, B787s and narrow body to A320 and B737 families.

The signs of convergence are seen everywhere. One of the most recent developments has been Qi - the wireless charging. A longtime favorite of many, positioned to win when Apple finally decided to use it rather than develop its own standard. And just recently Powermat dropped its own one and joined Qi, so finally we have a single contact wireless charging standard established.

Similar story has been with Bluetooth for personal audio. Everybody supports that and nobody even thinks of developing an alternative. Standards do evolve so at some point it pays to improve an existing one rather than trying to create something new. Sometimes it even is not possible. Bluetooth pools so many wireless personal audio patents that it is probably impossible to design around them. But it is possible to improve Bluetooth and this is what the companies within the working groups continue doing.

Mesh is not different. At some point we realized it was a better idea to improve Bluetooth by introducing the mesh topology (and benefit from the broad market penetration Bluetooth has already had), rather than design something completely new and battle up hill for acceptance and market adoption. Mesh changes the game in the low power wireless category, as today there is very little reason (if any) to use something else. Before Bluetooth could do mesh, people had to use something else. Now when it can, there is no reason to look elsewhere at all.