Your own personal network. Bloomberg Boot Camp, a report on today's technology. The promise of have a wireless personal network is finally becoming real. Bluetooth devices are being introduced by a number of manufacturers... .and by next year at this time... should become pretty popular. Bluetooth is a wireless standard that will let you connect devices you use everyday... computers, cell phones, PDAs, printers, digital cameras... even your car. 3com is on the market now with PC card and USB Bluetooth adaptors. The trick is... .says 3com's Kurt Olsen... to allow the various connections to work... and still provide security...

"There are a couple of implementations of security with Bluetooth. The first one is that the communications are encrypted. It's no simple matter to intercept Bluetooth wireless communications and try to hack through them because they are encrypted. The second level has to do with security levels that I set on all these different devices that define how they communicate with each other."

You can decide whether to allow other people to connect with your phone, PDA or printer for instance...

"Then they go through a very simple process that says this phone will see this laptop and on our Bluetooth connection manager screen you can see that it will actually say these two devices are paired and that no one else can see it. And that would be particularly important with a phone because I wouldn't want someone else to be able to connect to my phone and dial out."

Bluetooth promises to add a lot of convenience to all kinds of devices and gadgets ... for wireless phone headsets... .connections between your PDA and your car... and lots more. Bloomberg Boot Camp, I'm Fred Fishkin.