21 Bluetooth Connection Proximity Marketing

Proximity or Bluetooth Marketing suppliers face many challenges in delivering solutions that meet consumer demand for instant access to rich content on their mobile devices. Currently most Proximity Marketing systems use Bluetooth as their primary technology to deliver content, so one of the biggest challenges is servicing a large number of consumers quickly with high quality content using a relatively low bandwidth wireless technology.

It has become an industry standard to supply Proximity Marketing servers with 3 Bluetooth radios fitted, any more and you run the risk of radio interference, any less and the system may not have sufficient bandwidth to service the number of consumers wanting content. Bluetooth technology supports up to 7 simultaneous connections per Bluetooth radio, therefore if you have a Proximity Marketing server with 3 radios you should in theory be able to service 21 simultaneous connections, and if you listen to the hype this is what you would expect in practise also.

However, if we look at the analogy of Internet connectivity, we can identify some issues. During low-usage times of the day the Internet will be very responsive and users can download large amounts of data very quickly. However when the number of users goes up you will experience severe degradation of the service and downloads that earlier were very quick are now seemingly very slow. This is caused by limited bandwidth on the Internet connection that everyone is sharing.

The same potential effect exists when downloading content using Bluetooth, so if one consumer is connected to a Proximity Marketing server they will likely experience a quick download, however as the number of connections goes up the download speeds will be significantly reduced due to the limited bandwidth. To put this into perspective, it is expected that with one connection per Bluetooth radio a 500kB video could be downloaded in 30 seconds, if the download takes any longer consumers gets impatient. If more connections are allowed more consumers will be serviced simultaneously, but the download time will drop significantly leading to a bad experience.

It is also worth noting that many mobile phones do not provide a progress bar, (Nokia is one such example) so there is no indication of how much of the download has been completed. Therefore if the download is very slow many consumers will have no idea what is going on, which may result in them giving up.

In understanding the limitations of Bluetooth technology, mobile phones, and consumer experience, Hypertag’s products support 3 simultaneous connections per unit, prioritising download speed rather than number of simultaneous connections. With over 3 years experience of deploying our wearable Hypertags in high load festival and event situations, these units deliver again and again in the toughest of load environments proving this strategy delivers results.

Hypertag’s next generation platform, which will be beta trialling in Q2 2010, includes unique enhancements to better utilise the number of Bluetooth connections without impacting on perceivable download performance. Further details of this system will be available next year.