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How Does Bluetooth Work?
Nick Hunn • 2025-04-01
Dylan Carnahan:Welcome to the Simple Questions Podcast. This is your host, Dylan Carnahan. The question for this episode is, how does Bluetooth work? You will learn in this episode, the story behind Bluetooth's name, the evolution of its adoption, and the future of Bluetooth technology. Our guest is a recipient of the Queens Award for Technology for his groundbreaking contributions to wireless technology. Acclaimed author of Introducing Bluetooth LE, A Guide for Developers, Technology Strategists, Analysts, and Investors Wanting to Understand the Bluetooth LE Audio Standard, and is a pioneering expert credited with coining the term Hearables, I introduce to you Nick Hunn. Typically, you'll hear me at the beginning of each podcast interview discuss one of my earliest memories associated with whatever the discussion is about. In this instance, Nick, I have so many memories that have accumulated over my lifetime, whether it be as simple as connecting to a JBL speaker, putting in earphones like an AirPod or simply getting a sound bar and connecting to it. There's just an overwhelming amount of just these small memories that are all relating to this one specific piece of technology. I'm curious, Nick, how did you first hear and use Bluetooth?
Nick Hunn:I first heard about it actually before it was called Bluetooth. Now, I think you mentioned, didn't you say you're 27?
Dylan Carnahan:That's correct.
Nick Hunn:So, you were born in the year that Bluetooth was announced to the world.
Dylan Carnahan:Interesting.
Nick Hunn:It's been here that long, 1998. I actually got involved, I had a startup company and we were trying to connect up laptops with mobile phones and that started in about 1990. First, GSM phones, which were the European standard for digital phones, came out in 92. And those allowed you to connect up to laptops and connect up data. And we forget just how far back that was. I mean, the data speeds those days were 2,400 bits per second. I mean, that makes today's just unbelievably fast. But there was a lot of work going on to try and see, could you connect laptops up while you were moving? Could you actually connect to the Internet while you were out of the office? And a number of companies were working on that. Intel was really interested because it wanted everybody to have laptops. But the issue with everybody having laptops is if you were out of the office, you couldn't connect to anything. So they teamed up with Ericsson to see if you could connect them together. We as a startup were doing a little bit of work with both of those. And I was aware of some of the background research. And then Intel orchestrated an even sort of bigger initiative. They brought Nokia on board so that they got two radio experts. They brought IBM in to give them the laptop expertise. And they brought in Toshiba, who had both the laptop and also some basically consumer goods. And together that formed a new consortium. They decided to call it Bluetooth. There's lots of history as to why that happened. And as most of it seemed to happen in a bar somewhere in Scandinavia, nobody can really remember quite how it happened. But it was named after King Harold, who was a Danish king a thousand odd years back, who was credited with bringing together all of the different Scandinavian countries and trying to stop them fighting at least for a couple of years. And he was called Bluetooth because his favorite fruit were blueberries. But back in 98, they'd sort of written the beginnings of this standard. They developed some of the first prototypes, and a number of companies got invited to come along and be part of that. Our little startup had just been acquired by TDK, the Japanese tape manufacturer. We got asked to get involved. And that was really where my journey with Bluetooth started, literally the year you were born. And it's been an interesting roller coaster ever since, as we've tried to work out what to do with it.
Dylan Carnahan:Wow. There are so many things that dive in there. Something I want to point out, Nick, is there were many people ahead of this interview that I solicited for questions. And one of the most commonly asked things, specifically David Nassar and Dr. Marvin Cotton Jr. asked me, was where the name Bluetooth came from. So I'm so elated that you covered that. And there's just so much. And that's just one of the many things that you said that's very interesting. I'm curious, from that point in time, how has this technology evolved from that point to where we are today?
Nick Hunn:Almost serendipitously. As often happens when you're designing any new technology, you start off with trying to think of some of the use cases you're going to use it for. And when Bluetooth was first being worked on, there were three major use cases that everybody thought that it would be used for. The aim was to combine both data transfer, so you could do things like email and internet access by connecting phones to laptops. You would be able to use it with little headsets, and these are the early ones that we remember seeing people like taxi drivers wearing, so you could talk to your mobile phone. And the other one was, it was meant to be a bridge between mobile phones and digital cordless phones in the home. So back in the late 90s, most of us still had little handheld cordless phones for use around the house. I mean, in Europe, they used the digital standard that's called DECT. In the States at the time, most of them were still using the ATT and the Bell ones that were analog ones. But the aim there was that Bluetooth could provide a way of connecting those together, which meant that you could actually take a phone call on your cordless phone at home and then transfer that to a mobile phone. So that was the starting point of what everybody thought it was going to be. The reality was that none of those actually worked very well. Wi-Fi came along a couple of years later and slowly took over as the way to connect your laptops. Now Bluetooth actually did a pretty good job and for many years was faster than Wi-Fi, but Wi-Fi was what Inter liked, it's what got pushed and everybody went down that route. In terms of connecting your home phone with your mobile phone, nobody had thought about the business model of that. The business model was basically that either your standard wired phone provider or your mobile provider would lose money to the other. So they immediately ganged up and said, that's not going to happen. And in terms of the headset, not that many people were using those to begin with. It wasn't until later on that we started to see people using this while they were driving. The government regulation started to push that as something for Bluetooth to do. So the first five to six years of Bluetooth was sort of all sorts of other strange things where it was going out trying to work out what to do. One of the first things that it really got much volume in was credit card readers. I mean, today we're all used to the little terminals that we get given, and most of those use Bluetooth. But it was right back in the early days, that industry was saying, should we use Bluetooth or should we use Wi-Fi? And their feeling at that point in time was that Bluetooth was more secure than Wi-Fi. So the whole of that industry slowly started to move towards using Bluetooth, and it still does. And for probably the first six or seven years of Bluetooth, that was one of the major things that was actually used for. Now, I should qualify used for here, because Bluetooth was successful, largely because nobody used it. And that may sound a really odd thing, but around about 2000, mobile phones moved from being just something that were an expensive toy for business people, to becoming very much a consumer device. And that was all about companies like Nokia, Ericsson, Sony, making relatively cheap phones. And the network operators providing quite decent price plans so that it was affordable to use them. And the thing that really started to worry everybody was that a lot of the phone use were being used when people were driving cars. So you'd see people driving along with the phone in the hand, and everybody was scared stiff that people would get run over and the whole of that business would be closed down. Now, that was a real concern in the States because in the US, almost a third of the revenue from mobile phone calls came from people using phones when they were driving. It was what was the profit effectively for all of the telecom companies. And they really wanted to make sure that nobody banned mobile phones. So they got together with the phone manufacturers and with Bluetooth, and they lobbied the governments to say, if we go for hands-free, and we start to build Bluetooth into every car and Bluetooth into every phone, then that means there's a safe legal way of making phone calls in cars. So what happened is Bluetooth got built into every phone, it got built into every car. Whether anybody used those, we don't know. But it drove the cost down to a point where Bluetooth was suddenly just really cheap to put into everything. I mean, when we started off, a single Bluetooth chip was about $50. Four or five years in, it was down to $5. And then another four or five years, it cost less than $1 to add Bluetooth functionality. And that meant that everything had it, and people started to think, if it's that cheap, what can I do with it? And that's when we started to see lots of interesting applications coming in that weren't just about having phone calls when you were driving. One of the first of those that came along was just looking at doing audio streaming. Took about five years to move from the point where Bluetooth could support voice, which doesn't need an awful lot of bandwidth to support voice. But to move up and be able to stream music, you need to be able to push quite a lot more data backwards and forwards. And right about 2006, we saw the first of what's called the A2DP, the Advanced Audio Distribution Profile. I mean, this is proof you should never let engineers name anything. It's the worst possible name for anything I think you've ever, it has become mass market. But it let you stream audio. And around the same time, we started to see MP3 coming along, allowing people to download music, putting lots of music files on their phones, on their laptops. And we moved to this new world where all of a sudden, you could start to stream it. It came in with the MP3 players, we had the iPods. And then we saw the very beginning of streaming services like Pandora and Napster. And from Bluetooth point of view, audio has basically been what most people associate with Bluetooth. You just assume, to begin with, that you can stream any music you want to a Bluetooth speaker. And nowadays, obviously, that's moved on and you can stream it to headsets and everything else. And it's been fascinating the effect that's had. It's really changed the whole of the recording industry. And the fact you no longer buy music, you hire music. But the other interesting one is the freedom it's given a lot of people, a lot of plumbers, builders, people that just sort of general handyman jobs. It always used to be the case that typically it was the husband who went out and did the work and the wife stayed at home to look after the telephone and take the orders. And all of a sudden, with having Bluetooth and mobile phones, your wife could go out and work as well because you could just take the calls or it could go into your voicemail system. And we have a whole sea change in the way that people are able to actually do their jobs because you've got headsets, you've got mobile phones, you've got storage. And it's been fascinating how those have come together and just changed the way that whole segments of work have changed, particularly for self-employed people.
Dylan Carnahan:That was a fantastic walkthrough, Nick. And again, just as you're saying, there's all these deep impacts, these societal impacts, how it impacts household roles, all sorts of things. Wow, what an excellent walkthrough. I greatly appreciate that. One of the things, Nick, that you've mentioned a couple times, and I've seen this in looking at the literature regarding Wi-Fi or Bluetooth, is you've mentioned a couple times a digital standard and specifically the word standard often. Could you elaborate on what that is for us?
Nick Hunn:Yes. I mean, one of the things everybody realized at the beginning of Bluetooth and the same thing happened at the beginning of mobile phones with the GSM phones, is you can either work from a point where everybody tries to do their own design which aren't compatible and you just hope for basically Darwin to take over and one of them evolves and becomes a de facto standard. Or you can start off by saying, let's all work together and we'll try to make all of our products work with each other, not just with our own products. When you get that right, you get a networking effect and rather than selling hundreds of thousands or millions, you end up selling hundreds of millions or billions. And it's always the aim that you can try and get everybody to work together for the greater good. Now, in order to do that, you need to get everybody to sit down together and agree on what that design is going to be. And there are standards bodies that have existed around the world, typically going back sort of 150 odd years to the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, when people were starting to think, let's make all of our steam engines work the same way. Let's make railway tracks the same size so that we can, different people can make trains and they'll all run on the same tracks. And these days we have digital standards and those started way back when the first telephone systems came up and then the first broadcast systems for radios and for TVs that let different companies make equipment that all performed in effectively the same way. They could each differentiate, they could add more flashing lights or louder speakers or other stuff like that. But it was providing a standard that everybody could work together. One of the other things that came along was looking at qualification because people realized early on, if you could have a standard, lots of manufacturers could say, we've made our product to that standard. But then if you bought one from company A and company B, you'd find they wouldn't work together because each one had only decided to put in the bits they liked. And we started to see qualification schemes arise where a standard would say, we're going to own a lot of intellectual property. And if you want to use it in your product, then you have to take your product through a certain set of tests to say that you actually implement the minimum parts of this, that means that you will work at a basic level with everybody else's product. And today we have quite a lot of standards like that. I mean, we have them for mobile phones, the GSM standards for 2G, 3G, 4G, 5G. We have it for an awful lot of other bits and pieces. We have it for Bluetooth. We have it for Wi-Fi. And those wireless standards are incredibly complex to define how things work. And I just think this one, I mean, wireless is really difficult. And if you look at what we do with wireless, if we just say, I can connect my phone to a Bluetooth speaker, I can actually do that with a cable and I could describe how that cable works probably about three or four lines on a page. To do the same thing with Bluetooth where I've got to make sure that it's robust against interference from anything else, that it's a fast enough link, that I don't get glitches within my audio, to make sure that it happens quickly so that I don't have to wait three or four seconds between the audio going in at one end and coming out of the other. You end up with a specification that's typically a thousand pages long, not just one or two lines that says take a piece of copper, put some plastic over it and cut it to length and put a connector on. And so it's surprisingly complicated designing this. The chips that actually implement this are incredibly complex to design. And when we started doing Bluetooth, people were saying you're never going to make that chip cheaply. It runs at 2.4 gigahertz, which at that point was a really, really high and difficult frequency. And it took an immense amount of innovation to make these chips and then get them down. And today, the actual Bluetooth chip portion is typically only 10 to 20 cents of a device. There's massive additional processors that go on it to make it work and to handle the audio. But it's been incredible, not just how the price has come down at the same time as the complexity has gone up. I mean, this is all part of the Moore's Law, the thing that says that every two years, we can get sort of double the number of transistors on a chip. And at the same time, we also cut the power consumption down by about a third each time we do this. So, we have these standards, and the standards are all run by bodies of engineers coming together from different companies. And in Bluetooth, we have a particular approach to licensing, that everybody gives in their IP, and that goes into the standard. And nobody gets paid a fee for that. We work on the sort of the greater good, that if it works, the market grows. And today, there's something like 3 billion Bluetooth chips sold every year. So it's worked quite well for this industry. And the really good thing about that is you don't get much politics in these meetings. You just get a group of engineers who are trying to produce the very best technical solution they can think of. That itself has its issues, because they all of them think they often think they've got a better way of doing it than anyone else. Sometimes even two engineers from the same company will sit there arguing as to which is the best way to do it. But it's quite a good and really inspiring situation to be in, of having these bright people sort of arguing the toss of what works best and should we do this? And also thinking about how do you make it cost effective? Because we could design something that was really difficult and really expensive. And part of Bluetooth has always been going back to say, well, is it good enough for purpose? And if it is, don't make it more complex just for the sake of showing off. But today, there's lots of different bits of the Bluetooth standard for the basic radio, for the way it does audio, for the way it works in lots of medical devices, for the way that you put it into cars and you put it into automation. We even have standards in the way that you put this into things like pizza ovens. There's a lot of factory automation which uses Bluetooth. Bluetooth is really good against radio interference, so it works on things like robots that are doing welding on car assembly lines, whereas other radios don't work there. And it's just fascinating the way that people keep on coming in and saying, can we write another bit of the Bluetooth standard because we want to use it for something else that's important to us.
Dylan Carnahan:What an integral piece of technology that as you're saying, if you look at the past, was underutilized and now you're saying you're having all these people come to you looking for standardization of its usage in a wide array, whether that's manufacturing or consumer goods. One of the things, Nick, that we've talked about a little bit, and you alluded to the volume of these chips, how does Bluetooth work from a hardware perspective?
Nick Hunn:When you say how does it work from a hardware perspective, essentially, it's a low-power radio. It works at a high frequency. And it works in something that's called an ISM band, an industrial scientific and medical band. The spectrum, the radio spectrum, is one of the most controlled and fought after things in existence because every government, every national broadcaster, every police force, every military operation, wants to use as much of that for themselves as they possibly can. And we see for the mobile phone networks, typically governments set up auctions where operators have to pay money to get access to those networks. Now, within that, there are a couple of bands that have been set aside that can be freely used by everybody. And they range from ones that are used for things like radio-controlled aircraft, for garage door openers, for sort of baby alarms. And there's a band that sits at 2.4 gigahertz, which is used, available for anybody to use within reason. I'll talk about the within reason in a moment. And that was the band that Wi-Fi and Bluetooth have grown up in. It's one of the bands that isn't licensed for a reason. It's the same band that's used by microwave ovens. And the reason that microwave ovens used it is, it's a frequency that will excite the basic water molecule. So if you shove lots of energy out at 2.4 gigahertz, it will warm up anything wet, whether that's your microwave dinner, roast potatoes, somebody that stands in front of a big radar. Somebody even once filed a patent for wallpaper that has a little emitter behind that to try and warm you up in your room without using heating. It's an area where you can have mad ideas. Now, I said use within reason. In order to make sure that lots of people can share it, there are reasonable use requirements. And you have to limit the amount of power that you use. And that limits the range that you can transmit at. And you also have to be kind to other people who want to use it. And there's two basic ways of doing that. One is to listen to see if somebody else is doing anything before you transmit. And only transmit when you can see that it's clear. Or you can do something that's called frequency hopping. You can divide the band up into lots of different channels. And each time you transmit, you move to a different channel. So the chances are that if you do that really quickly, you're not going to interrupt anybody else's transmission. Bluetooth uses that frequency hopping approach. Wi-Fi uses the listen before talk approach of seeing if something's there. And then if something's there, just stepping back for a random time and trying again. That means they don't interfere much with anybody else. We have to cope with lots of things. I mean, like microwave ovens, there are lots of other devices. I mean, like garage door openers and baby alarms, all sorts of things that just use cheap and cheerful radio technology. But on the whole, it works quite well. There are national regulations that say you can't produce something that deliberately goes and jams everything else. And if you do it, somebody might come along, a policeman with a spectrum analyzer and say, you can't do that. That does occasionally happen. And if people complain, there are government authorities you could complain to and they will check. And we now have some other bands that are higher up. We have a 5.1 gigahertz band that's being used. There are others above that. And those haven't been used so much because making silicon chips that work at those really high frequencies is very difficult. And Bluetooth really cracked how to do it at 2.4 gigahertz. And the companies that did that are now moving up and have got solutions that run in these higher frequency bands. But it's an ever expanding story. And obviously, as more and more people use this more and more of the time, we are going to need to expand out and find even more clever techniques so that we don't fall over each other in terms of just what we're doing. And a lot of the time, we actually monitor what our link is like. So if I'm transmitting to my speaker, the speaker will come back and say, is it receiving a good signal or a poor signal? And if it's got a good signal, it'll probably say, well, just try reducing your transmit power a little. Because I don't need anymore, that way there'll be a bit more spectrum degree for everybody else. So it is an industry where everybody is aware you need to co-exist if it's going to work nicely together.
Dylan Carnahan:Wow. This has been a profound discussion. This has been a profound discussion. Like you're saying, this is an ongoing story. It's very rich. It's complicated. Again, you can't write it in three sentences on a piece of paper like, you know, cord connectivity. You gave a little example there right at the end, Nick, about kind of how two devices are interacting. We talked about a little bit of hardware and the implications of that, but just from a very simple perspective, how are devices able to connect to one another utilizing this?
Nick Hunn:The way for most of Bluetooth's life is you need to go through a process that's called pairing. And it's, I'm not quite sure where the name came from. In the early days, we had lots of discussions about what do you call the bits of Bluetooth that actually touch people. People don't need to know about the details of how we do all of the frequency hopping and how we look to see if something's in the way and then we adapt our frequency hopping. There's lots of wonderfully verbose technical terms that you can sit in there and people don't need to know. But there's a few things where people do need to know. And one of those is how do you pair two devices together? And typically, if you have Bluetooth devices, you will press a button on one of them and it will say, I'm going into pairing mode. Or at least your instructions will say, do this. And then you press a button on the other device, which will also go to a pairing mode. And if they find each other, they will connect. Normally, there's something else that you need to do to make sure you're connecting to the right device and that it's not being sort of hacked by your sort of five year old who thinks, won't it be fun to see if I can take over daddy's Bluetooth lawnmower? And this only lasts for a few seconds while you're pressing the button, so it's quite secure. Wi-Fi, you can have a similar system or you can also, you've got systems where you put in codes, lots of different ways to do it. Once it's done that, they share a special security key and they will remember that. So that next time you want to connect, you will simply turn your device on and it should connect. Now, if it's a device like your phone and you've got a headset and a speaker, your application may say, which of these do you want me to stream audio to? That's generally the way that it works. There's a more recent extension of that, which we've just brought in to the latest version of Bluetooth audio. That's something called AuraCast, where rather than just having one device connect to another device, a device can now transmit audio and lots of devices within range can say, oh, I want to listen to that. It comes out of technology that's been there in hearing aids and in the hearing aid industry for about 70 years, something called Telecoil. You've probably seen the little Telecoil logos around, which look a bit like a stylized ear. That means that if you've got a hearing aid that supports that, you can press a button on it and you can listen. Now, typically, you'll find that in cinemas, in theatres. You may find it at transport hubs and at hotel reception desks. That allows anybody with one of those hearing aids to listen to the same audio message. With AuraCast in Bluetooth, we've extended that so that lots of them can overlap. Now, Telecoil works by having basically a very big inductive coil that typically goes around a whole room, and everybody in that room hears the same thing. With AuraCast, we can have lots of different transmitters, and that may be because you want to hear different things, or it may be because you want to hear it in different languages. And it will go to any hearing aid that supports it. It will also go to any of the next generation of earbuds or headsets. And it's going to mean that we start to get lots of public information or shared information that people can listen to. And that's a sort of paradigm change in the one-to-one that we've always had with Bluetooth, that it's basically your phone to your earbuds, or your phone to your headset, or your TV to your speakers and soundbar, to saying that you can start to share things. And if you've got something you want to share from your phone, you can just say to your friends, oh, do you want to listen to this? And if they want to, you can just say share to your phone, your phone will show a little QR code. If they scan that with their phones, it will then tell their earbuds, just go and listen to Dylan's phone instead of what you were doing. There's a whole host of new social audio applications that are going to come along as a result of that. We've just seen some of the first trials in concert halls, opera houses, and in pop venues around the world that are demonstrating that you can use this and how easy it is to do that work. So in the next couple of years, social audio is going to become something I think that becomes very exciting for the way we start to use music.
Dylan Carnahan:I want to go back, and I'm pulling this out of one of the things you said. And again, as a layman, this is just comedic to an extent. But I hear you talk about in the pairing process, use words like security key, right? And you talk about how that's a secure connection, and it's a short duration. What are some of, I guess, the concerns that maybe are warranted or unwarranted about this technology? Maybe from a privacy perspective, or just again, as someone that may not understand how this magical thing is connecting to things, and I exist, and I can't see it.
Nick Hunn:Bluetooth has been designed to be secure. Now, and it's an easy thing to say, and every company will say this. We spend a lot of time looking at security to try and make sure it's secure. And we have a security expert group, which involves people whose day job is basically looking at security. A fair number of them, I can't even tell you who they work for, which means you can guess exactly who they work for. Because everybody, not just in Bluetooth, but sort of Bluetooth manufacturers in the community, but also governments and government security agencies are very keen that consumer technology like this is secure. And that's not just Bluetooth, that's true for mobile phones, it's true for any wireless communication, because you don't want it to be eavesdropped. And every week we see examples where things have been let open, things have been hacked. So we take a lot of care, we work with a lot of experts to make sure this works. On the other hand, if you just want to listen to your music on your phone, you don't want to be putting sort of 200 digit hexadecimal codes into your phone every time you want to play another tune. So there is a balance between what is secure and what's private. For most of Bluetooth, we are a short range radio connection. If you're looking at a Bluetooth voice application, you can very easily overhear it just by walking up next to the person and hearing it. If you're looking at a credit card transfer, that's important, that needs to be a lot more secure. The way that those are set up and the internal security with Bluetooth is very high. We have designed everything to meet government standards, not just industry standards in terms of what security needs to be. So there is a lot of work that has gone in to making this secure. For the use purposes that it is out there, I don't think anybody needs to worry about Bluetooth. One of the other aspects that you have in terms of privacy is, every digital device you have, whenever it's turned on, is transmitting. It's possible to monitor devices, and from that, you could in theory track people. You can do that with mobile phones, you can do that with Wi-Fi. So again, we put features in that will constantly rotate that information, which means that it becomes very difficult, from a privacy point of view, to use a Bluetooth device that you're wearing, which could be a fitness band, it could be a medical device, it could be your headset. As you walk along the street, it will change its identity. Your devices will know that because they're secretly telling each other how they're changing. But it's designed to be secure. And because we have so many people involved with it, and that also means because we have so many post-graduate, desperate to make their name by finding out whether they can hack it, that it is, we believe, as secure as it needs to be for its applications. And that it's always a cat and mouse game of, can you stay ahead of where you are with people hacking it? And we think Bluetooth is as secure as we can realistically make it at the moment, at the same time as having it as a mass market product that everybody can go out and pick up and use. I don't worry about it. There are other standards I do worry about.
Dylan Carnahan:Thank you for that very concise explanation there. That's very helpful, and that does provide a level of reassurance. And I think also, knowing more about the technology as a whole, I can understand where you're coming from with those statements. Again, going back to things like, there's an overarching governance, right? Like all these different elements, I see how they come together for the answer that you've provided, Nick. I'm curious, there's been a proliferation of this technology. You talk about the new standards for different varying types of devices, where all those devices are used, all of those things. There's been a giant proliferation of Bluetooth being embedded within things. How do you feel about that?
Nick Hunn:I'm really excited and I'm very happy to have been part of that. I mean, all of my life, I've loved making things. And I've been really fortunate through my career, I've worked in lots of different industries and made lots of different things. And I've also enabled people to make lots of other things. I've been involved with a startup where we made Bluetooth and other wireless modules, and literally they went into everything from sex toys to snow plows. It's amazing when you tell somebody, you can get rid of a cable of how they decide to get rid of the cable in their particular application and for what reason. So I'm really happy that Bluetooth has caught the imagination of so many different people. Now we have some applications where it's sort of the same thing, just millions and hundreds of millions and even billions of times. But even within those people are looking to see how do they differentiate, how to make their product different. What's the next thing coming along? And there have been some of those where it hasn't gone anywhere. But there equally been others that have really changed people's lives. And I just think it's fascinating the way you give somebody a bill banking block and then seeing just how they take that. In the early days, there was the story. There was a little just the graphic that people used of the two children sort of with the tin can and the string in between them listening to each other, and a pair of scissors cutting the string. And it's that simplicity of you are cutting the cable, and you are allowing things to happen without something getting in the way. And we've just seen so many devices, and so many devices where people probably don't even think Bluetooth is in it, but it's that ability to get rid of the cable has transformed what you can do, and the way that things work. And that to me has just been amazing. And every time somebody comes along and says, I've got this new application, and you might think it's a bit strange, and I think, yes, please, the stranger, the better. Just think outside the box, because Bluetooth means the box can go away.
Dylan Carnahan:That's a very powerful statement. You know, your contributions are something that I have personal gratitude, and I'm sure that many other people will be grateful. Again, many people don't understand how this functions, right? It's just so, it's just so common. It's been normalized so much, and it's kind of missed, you know, create this mystic element about it. And you, your excitement, I'm so glad to hear that. What are some of those interesting uses you've seen for Bluetooth that are maybe more fringe like that, that you say, oh, my goodness, you know, I'm glad that someone thought of that, that's so unique.
Nick Hunn:And one of the ones I think a lot of people will be aware of, and probably don't even realize it's got Bluetooth in, is the little blood glucose sensors. I mean, they were developed for people with diabetes. But we're seeing them used more and more. My wife just got diagnosed as being pre-diabetic, and we just thought, right, buy one of those sensors, you just stick it on your arm for a fortnight, and you see the spikes from everything you eat. And I thought, well, I'll buy one as well. Let's just see what the difference is. And you realize there are some things, fish and chips in particular, which is really sad if you're British. You really wouldn't want to eat that for the sort of the blood sugar spike you see afterwards. But it's something, Bluetooth lets it work at really low power. So you can just put something on your arm. You don't need to think about changing batteries. It works for a fortnight. And you've got a graph of what's actually happening in your body against what you eat. There's lots of fitness applications like that, where people probably don't realize that it's Bluetooth. It connects to their phone. They can see something happening on their phone. But it's just Bluetooth under the covers doing that. One other really strange one that was one of the most fascinating, in many ways, scariest things I've ever seen is Britain's very much as a coastal country. We have lots of fishermen and an awful lot of them just go out in their trawlers. And every so often, they don't come back. And it's one man goes out in a ship and something goes wrong, they get swept overboard. And somebody did a really strange thing of thinking, one of the things about Bluetooth is it's got quite a short range. I mean, it's typically if you're out in the open air, it's about 100 meters. And they thought rather than using Bluetooth to send information over that, that you can use, let's use the loss of that link to tell us that somebody's fallen overboard. So they made a little device that fitted into the life jacket. And they had a little transmitter on the top of the cabin. And as long as the two could talk to each other, they said, this is fine, that person's on the boat. But if that link disappeared, it then sounded a warning to say they might have fallen overboard.
Dylan Carnahan:Okay.
Nick Hunn:So it was actually turning around the whole premise of Bluetooth, that the important thing in this case was that you lost the connection. And what was fascinating is the business model for that was actually funded by the boat insurers. Because they said, this is low cost, it doesn't cost much. But if we just save one life a year, that's paid for the whole program, we'll just fit this free to everything. And again, it's enabling people to think out of the box. We said we put it in snow plows. The biggest issue in snow plows is, snow plows work in the cold, and traditional cables break when they get cold. So the snow plow is now just using two enormous great cables that take DC power, I mean, 12 volts down, to a Bluetooth box that sits at the top, and everything else is done wirelessly using Bluetooth. And the uptime for those devices, where they no longer have the little control cables breaking, is so much longer. You just put a Bluetooth into every device that needs to do something, every little servo motor, and it works. And as I said, factory robots, welding robots in car plants, Bluetooth is really good at coping with interference. I'm just fascinated by all of these strange little things that people do with Bluetooth, because some of them will only ship a couple of hundred products a year. They're so specialized. But you can just take it, not really know anything about how it works in the middle, and just say, I put something in one end, and something comes out the other end. And everything in between could be magic. It doesn't matter. But as long as I can reliably put something in one end, and it comes out of the other, I've got rid of my cable. What can that do to the way I design something? Because historically, at least an awful lot of what we make is constrained by cables. And all of a sudden, it doesn't need to be. And it's so low power that you can probably put a little battery in and it runs for a year. So it's that just freedom of design that Bluetooth brings you. And you just say, stop thinking about what's the difficulty of making something. What do you want to do? And Bluetooth can probably help you do it.
Dylan Carnahan:You're coming up with some excellent ending sentences right there. That was a phenomenal closing little sentence, Nick. And I think it's interesting to just kind of look at how the technology is almost a reflection of society, given all the different ways it's been utilized. One of the things that I wanted to ask is, what is the future of Bluetooth? One of the things that you alluded to earlier was this trend of social audio. Is there anything else you can think of?
Nick Hunn:I think one of the most fascinating things is what's going to happen with ears. One of the most exciting things that happened was the development of, I dreamt up the word hearables, which seems to have caught on. And we now apply that to earbuds in particular. And at the moment, that's all about people just listening to music. And we're going to see lots more clever listening to music. The quality is going to go up. We're going to see spatial things so that music turns round with us. But the ear is a fascinating bit of the human body that we sort of forget about. It's where we have the bits of our body that actually keep us stable. So we've got the semicircular canals. It's why our heads stay upright even when the rest of our bodies are moving around. And like our wrists, where we tend to put everything at the moment, we just wave around. They're the worst possible place to put sensors. But the ear stable, it sort of goes in towards our brain. It's quite moist. It's really an ideal place for measuring things. It's why you have baby thermometers you put in the ear. But we can measure heart rate. We can measure pulse. There's so much that we can measure in the ear. And that can all start to get incorporated into the next generation of earbuds. We're already seeing some of that beginning to go in. And one of the big issues I think we have in a lot of health and fitness is getting enough data to be able to do something useful with it. And we all, I think, have the belief that if we can measure enough things, we can use those to see whether we are ill, whether we're well, whether something's going wrong or not. And the ear is going to be an ideal place to do a lot of that. And that fascinates me how we're going to see, I think, measurement moving from the wrist towards the ear. And one of the other interesting things is if we're talking today, if we look at the codex, they're the bits that digitize our voice and our music. They're not very good at conveying mood. We can convey voice very well and we can use it for voice recognition. But we don't do a very good job of picking up, are we happy? Are we depressed? Are we excited from that? That's another level which is just beginning to come into the way we're doing things. And again, that's picked up by what we're saying. Our earbuds pick it up and they're picking it up now through bone conduction as well as just through listening to our voice. So I think, I mean, voice is an odd one. We used to just talk the whole time on mobile phones and then we sort of gave up talking and we started listening to music. Now we're starting to get back into voice with podcasts. But I think that's going to be a resurgence of using voice and using hearing and seeing what we can do with that. And we're just at the beginning of that new age where voice is I think going to become a little bit more important. We'll have sort of augmented reality devices that don't do anything much more than just whisper in our ear occasionally. And we're going to have other devices that look at how well we are by listening to how we talk and looking at what's happening within our ears. And that's probably the next 15 to 20 years of research that's going to go on around what happens with hearing is we know so much about sight, we don't know anything like as much about hearing. And it's interesting. One of the things I'm doing, I'm sort of doing a talk in a month's time about the history of audio reproduction. And one of the bits that's strange that comes out from the history of that is how we had got film and sort of video earlier than we got sound recorded. And it's almost the same thing happening again, that we're coming back and thinking, well, the ears got some interesting stuff going on, but we're actually behind what we're doing with eyes. And it's time to catch up on that. And I think there's going to be some fascinating stuff that comes out from ears and hearing over the next 10, 15 years.
Dylan Carnahan:That is extremely insightful, Nick. Very, very insightful. And we're going to continue with that trend. With what advice do you have for people that are working on this technology?
Nick Hunn:I think just open your eyes and think what you can do. We have a real problem in a lot of technology that people just think in silos. And there's a lovely line in one of Kurt Vonnegut's novels, I think it's Play a Piano, that sort of show me an expert and I'll show you someone who's dug a hole to hide in. And we see that all the time that people just say, can I make it a bit better? Can I put go-faster stripes on it? Rather than looking out and saying, well, if I added a bit of that stuff from over there and maybe something that somebody's doing in some agriculture from there and put it all together, does it suddenly get a lot more interesting? And we need people to think outside that box of just thinking about do I want to achieve and how can I take bits and pieces to do it? Children do it really well when you give them a box of toys. They don't necessarily put the obvious bits together. And to them it makes sense. And then we stop asking why and we forget that. And keep on asking why and keep on playing. And remember that every product we design really needs a story behind it. It's not just can I make it cheaper? Can I make it faster? But how do I make it more exciting and how do I make it more relevant? And just keep on asking questions and doing the odd, because the odd can be good.
Dylan Carnahan:Very wise, very wise, Nick. What's the best way for people to learn more about you?
Nick Hunn:I sort of try to regularly write blogs. I've got the blog at nickhunn.com. It's all over the place from sort of my love of making automata to everything I think that's good about technology or bad about technology or bad about politics. One day, I'll write something that's good about politics, but having problems with that one at the moment. But it's mostly about just asking why and thinking everything we do should be telling stories. Because if we tell stories, we actually interact with things and the way we design things. At the bottom, what I love is making stuff and stuff needs to tell stories. So, that's that. And just go and keep on asking why about what you do and why you're doing it. And can you make something that's just more fun or just totally different? Because if everything's the same, life gets rather boring.
Dylan Carnahan:Yeah. Nick, thank you for your contributions and sharing your time today.
Nick Hunn:Well, thank you so much. And I think to all of you listeners, just go away, ask why and have fun. Thanks for the opportunity for the chat. It's thoroughly enjoyable.
Dylan Carnahan:That wraps up our conversation with Nick. We talked about the regulation of Bluetooth standards, social audio as a future trend, and the wide array of devices that use Bluetooth. Go to this episode's show notes to see any resources Nick mentioned during our episode. And lastly, subscribe to Simple Questions Podcast to get notified when our latest episodes are released. Thank you for listening, and remember to keep asking questions.