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Bluetooth 5 With 2x More Range and 4x Better Speed Coming Next Week (arstechnica.com)
Bluetooth is about to get more powerful. Mark Powell, executive director of the Bluetooth Special Interest Group noted in a newsletter that Bluetooth 5 will debut on June 16. The new incarnation of wireless standard offers "double the range and quadruple the speed of low energy Bluetooth transmissions." From an Ars Technica report: It also adds "significantly more capacity to advertising transmissions," which is more exciting than it sounds because it doesn't necessarily have anything to do with what you normally think of when you think of "advertising." In the Bluetooth spec, an "advertising packet" allows Bluetooth devices to send small snippets of information to other Bluetooth devices even if the two aren't actually paired or connected to one another.It's currently unclear whether existing devices will be able to support the new standard.
It's actually perfect. When you're writing a headline, there is limited real estate, and you don't want to waste it with fillers. Besides, that's actually a play on Ars Technica's headline. You won't want to fight with Conde Nast editors.
Twice the range and quadruple the speed are great, but how about the power consumption. If it also takes 2-4x the power (or even 1.5x), that's not going to be very useful as many BT devices are battery-powered.
Given the security issues it is unclear if more range is a good thing.
For advances, since IoT is coming at us like a crane falling down an alleyway, it would be nice for BT security to be improved. Toss E0, find a well tested cipher that works at low power, but has at least 256 bits, and a decent block size. Have pairing store a longer nonce, like at least 512 bits, so it can be used for a Diffie Hellman exchange for a session key, as well as having enough to have a unique IV. Of course, older devices and ones with less power may need a lesser algorithm, but part of the pairing process should be what each device can do, encryption-wise, so subsequent communications can't be "downgraded" with clients falling back to weaker encryption, unless that was initially specified in the pairing.
As for usefulness, if we can have Bluetooth be able to work with external hard drives at USB 2.0 speeds or better, that would be nice. No piggybacking off of Wi-Fi, ideally.
...and maybe that NSA van following me will be able to back off. I'm afraid they are going to rear end me.
"2x More Range"? "4x Better Speed"? Is English your first language?
"Three Times the Range" and "Five Times the Speed", or "3x Range" and "5x Speed" would be better.
Of course, I'm betting it's really just doubling the range and quadrupling the speed, not tripling and quintupling them. (When a marketer says "2x More!!" they mean "1x More".)
Are YOU a native speaker?
Nobody says 2x more to mean "original + (2 * original)", it always means 2x.
Do you say "2x less range"? What would that be mathematically?