Is BLE qualification required for proprietary service?

[Volodymyr]

Since related topic Is BLE changing licensing policy? was marked as resolved I moved my question to new one. My company is ready to get SIG membership for BLE usage and pay the fee. The only question is whether we need to pass qualification test if:

1. we are not going to use any Bluetooth logo or trademark on box, device
2. device will use the only proprietary BLE service
3. we don't even want to be compatible with any other profile or service
4. BLE is not the main service of our product
5. BLE will be used between our product and our application.

I would be really thankful for a piece of help. Thank you. PS. Tried to understand legal documents but unfortunately I am not lawyer.

[John]

Hi Volodymyr, I don't know if I have the correct answer to your question so I am posting this as a comment. My interpretation based on sitting in on the SIG conference call and reading their documentation last year is that you have to pay the fee for each product you ship that contains Bluetooth technology. You are essentially paying them for using the intellectual property in each product. Prior to last February you could buy an already qualified module and not pay a fee, but they were not able to fund their desired activity level with that model so they went to requiring a fee for each product.

[Volodymyr]

Thank you John for an effort. Unfortunately, I cannot use qualified module. We are going to use open-source Bluez with a chip without qualification. It is OK to pay the fee for our product, probably we already have got SIG membership.

BUT: We are using the only proprietary BLE service which won't be easy to qualify using PTS. To pass that qualification we need for sure to implement separate FW image which will support mandatory BLE options. It will take some time. The time, as usual, is the most expensive thing in our life. :-(

[John]

We did a proprietary service as well. That did not need to be qualified. However we did need to use Nordics qualifications for the Soft Device, and have RF testing done at a test house to generate the product listing that you have to pay the SIG for.

[Volodymyr]

Thank you again, you are pushing me to solution. As far as I understood, Nordic provides papers for Soft Device that is a FW on a chip. The chip is controlled over HCI. So, open source Bluez could easy work with that chip.

In your case you passed partial qualification "Start B" in www.bluetooth.org/.../qualification-overview

As far as I know, my chip passed RF test, need to double check. But I don't understand what is relation between RF and product listening. I see next ways:

1. Change chip to Nordic one(small probability), get papers from Nordic, get product listing, pay SIG
2. Ask current vendor for papers (almost impossible), get product listing, pay SIG
3. Do whole qualification of the current chip ourself by creating test FW, get product listing, pay SIG Tough life. :-(

Did you try to use PTS to test and pass qualification?

Thank you for your help.

[John]

To be honest, I do not know if we used PTS at all. We hired a test house who then assigned a Bluetooth Qualification Engineer who dealt with all of the SIG rules and interactions. It wasn't a lot of money and so worth it to not have to figure all of this out ourselves.