23 hours Ago By Jonathan Goldberg
In context: We imagine most of you are familiar with all the major wireless standards – so familiar, in fact, that it's become boring. We don't write much about them anymore, beyond the usual speculation around 6G, there just not that much worth saying. But on our recent trip to Mobile World Congress, we came across something genuinely new in the space.
New to the point of feeling almost magical – a new wireless standard. This new wireless standard is not only new, but also almost no one we know has heard of it. Like a magical treasure chest buried at the end of an electromagnetic rainbow, a new wireless standard is kinda exciting, especially when we learned that this standard is already widely deployed – over 100 million chips already shipped.
Editor's Note: Guest author Jonathan Goldberg is the founder of D2D Advisory, a multi-functional consulting firm. Jonathan has developed growth strategies and alliances for companies in the mobile, networking, gaming, and software industries. The standard is called Sparklink.
Take a minute to Google it, and we imagine all you'll find is links to guitar equipment. That seems to be the only application of Sparklink available in the US today. And therein lies the other part of this story.
Like any good fairy tale about magical treasure, there's a 'bogeyman' guarding the treasure. Because, of course, this standard was created by Huawei. We are still studying the history of Sparklink, but it runs something like this: In 2018, when Huawei first came under serious US sanctions, it was ejected from numerous industry groups, including the Bluetooth Special Interest Group (SIG).
Huawei was eventually let back in, but not before starting its own range of alternative standards. Sparklink seems to be the only one that actually gained traction and is now shipping in volume. Sparklink, also known as NearLink, is positioned as an alternative to Bluetooth , but designed in a way that addresses all the lessons learned from that standard's shortcomings – a clean-slate design to address the issues discovered in the years since Bluetooth came on the scene.
Sparklink's air interface seems to be an amalgamation of elements from both Bluetooth and Wi-Fi, with technical specs that exceed both. This is a workable comparison of the standards . As we noted above, something like 100 million Sparklink devices have already shipped.
That is small in comparison to Bluetooth, which ships a few billion units a year, but it's big enough to indicate it has real commercial traction. What kinds of devices does Sparklink support? All of them. This is the international Sparklink Alliance's website , and this is their membership page.
It contains a few hundred names covering almost every corner of electronics – from phones and computers to cars and industrial systems. Almost all the members are based in China, but we have learned that companies from other countries are starting to incorporate Sparklink into their own products, including notable categories like TVs and autos. We believe these foreign companies will be bundling Sparklink with products for the Chinese market.
At this point, there are probably tens of millions of Sparklink users there, which is approaching critical mass – beyond which any company selling into China will have to consider adopting the standard. Which, of course, opens the question as to how far this will go. Or put another way, at what point will Apple have to include Sparklink in the iPhone? Probably not an urgent question for them right now, but at some point, Apple and every other consumer electronics company will have to review the need for Sparklink capabilities.
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