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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.
Have they fixed the problem where X-Ray, UV, and visible light are stopped by walls, and yet people are still too dumb to figure out microwave bluetooth signals aren't high-energy enough to cause cancer or brain damage? Do we have a patch that at least informs them that light is also EMR, the same kind of radio waves as bluetooth and wifi, but stationed between your cell phone's signal and cancer-causing ultraviolet rays, so these people all panic and go running into the sea like lemmings?
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Can we have 3X less reliability though please. I really hate how rock solid previous versions were.
Two of my imaginary friends reproduced once
"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".)
I am missing any reference to mesh networking in the announcement. Come one, it feels like it has been already been decades, that mesh networking is supposed to come with the next release.
"Between strong and weak, between rich and poor [...], it is freedom which oppresses and the law which sets free"
No more having to sit next to that insufferable twat for an hour to crib his contacts because he's too stupid to secure his bluetooth connection. Now I can do it from the table over in less time than I need for my breakfast!
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
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.
IDK about everyone else but the main reason I don't use Bluetooth for audio is the latency. It's better but still not good and will never be == 0 ms. One place that I thought I might try Bluetooth 4 on was a super mobile DJ setup for house parties. I had some Bluetooth 4 speakers and a RCA to Bluetooth 4 transmitter. The problem is as a DJ you listen to the next track and try and match tempo but the speakers will always be super delayed in comparison to the headphones that are hard wired. I am use to audio delays but I couldn't think of a trick to correct this as the delay fluctuates. People have similar troubles when they try to connect a TV through Bluetooth where the lips don't match with the dialog. Bluetooth is great for someone that just wants to play audio in their car or at the pool but thats about it.
Bluetooth is notoriously insecure, longer range and more effective discovery would only make attacks easier.
This sounds just like more advertising capabilities.
How is being able to send small snippets of information (ADS) to other bluetooth devices even though they are not paired or connected to one another not advertising.
Crap now if I get a Bluetooth 5 device I am going to have to turn it off, sounds like a very useful tech for advertisers not customers. But as we all know we are not the customer when we buy something these days.
From my experience with Bluetooth, that statement is pretty meaningless.
The "Standard" is 30 feet or 10 meters (which doesn't even add up, I guess we're all too stupid to be able to convert).
However I've found that some devices seem to meet that standard, while others have a range that could be more accurately measured in inches.
Therefore that POS wireless speaker I got at BestBuy for 80$ will have a range of 8 inches rather than only 4!
I have a Garmin fitness band that's paired to my iPhone. When I inadvertently leave my phone in my office, I am often surprised just how far away I can get and still get notifications - through walls and a steel door.
I am not sure adding range to Bluetooth is particularly useful. It may even be a security concern.
Now what I'd really prefer they work on is the lag issues related to newer versions of Bluetooth (not necessarily the low-power version). I have some old Sony DR-BT101s that work great - the battery still lasts through a week's commute (three hours daily use, four days a week); the connection is reliable; and I can watch movies and not have to worry about the sound being out of sync with the movie. I've tried several different brands of Bluetooth 4 headphones, and all of them occasionally display audio lag... enough to make movies unwatchable, and enough to be annoying when listening to podcasts or music (or phone calls). If the BT101s ever die, I may go back to wired headphones.
#DeleteChrome
It's far less convenient to write a multi-paragraph reply on a phone's touch screen than on a Bluetooth keyboard. And many video games, such as Pixeline and the Jungle Treasure, work far better with a Bluetooth keyboard or gamepad than with an on-screen virtual gamepad. What alternative do you propose that allows the use of external keyboards and gamepads?
The 2Mbit PHY doubles the symbol rate, but it comes at the cost of range. The "Long Range" PHY doubles the range, but may drop you to as little as 125Kbps (or 500Kbps if you're not at the hairy edge)
As for power usage -- That's directly proportional to the duty cycle of the radio. For a given amount of data, the 2Mbit PHY will in theory nearly halve your power consumption over 1Mbit. The long-range PHY can result in 2x or 8x the power consumption of the 1Mbit mode, based purely on how long it takes to transmit or receive a single bit.
Anyway.
-- I ain't broke, but I'm badly bent.
I've had to complete give up on bluetooth headphones because it's not possible to listen to music while walking down the street unless I ensure my phone is hovering no more than a few inches away from my headphones.
Farther away, and the frequent interruptions are unbelievably annoying.
When I walk past the Verizon store in Washington DC Union Station I always receive a text message from the store asking me to come in and shop. It is always on the first time walking past and it's happened about a dozen times so far.
I have an Android phone with Bluetooth, GPS, and NFC turned off, so I don't know how it's doing this.
Kriston
I don't want twice the range. I miss enough calls now when I get out of my car and forget to turn off the BT speakerphone.
And by mixing, I mean a Bluetooth receiver (headphones, etc) that could be paired with multiple devices at the same time. For example, having a single headset paired with a phone and a computer and no stupid tricks necessary to hear audio from either source simultaneously.
Obviously there would need to be some stupid tricks involved to adjust sound levels or something.
I've had headphone dongles that allowed multiple device pairings, but you have to manually switch between devices, or worse, disable bluetooth entirely on one device to get the secondary device to pair.
Will this solve the problem of my BT headphones cutting out when my phone is in my pocket?
Sorry, teleporters just kill you and then make a copy. A perfect, soul-less copy.
Bluetooth human interface devices are self-powered, that is, they're powered by a battery inside the device. Most USB human interface devices, by contrast, are not self-powered, instead relying on bus power that the host or an intermediate self-powered hub must supply. Thus a USB keyboard through an OTG cable might drain the host's battery even faster than a Bluetooth radio. This is especially true if you have multiple active devices, such as a keyboard, mouse, and headphones, which would require a bus-powered hub that sucks even more power. Finally, Bluetooth headphones pose less of a strangulation risk during exercise than corded headphones.
What else is improved? Power consumption? Ease of connection? Can it now finally, reliably be used as a GOOD audio transmission protocol for music (Apple... are hoping, I bet....) ?
What about maximum devices in a room? Can you have 42 of these in a small hall like a university lecturing room? What about 90 of them?
What about latency?
You know, for mice.
https://www.youtube.com/c/BrendaEM
Please Slashdot editors,
Make summaries interesting for your target readers.
If you want to shift your target to people who, within the context of a wireless protocol, consider "advertisements" as something bad and intrusive and not some type of broadcast service announcement, that's ok. But please, in that case tell us clearly, so we can find an alternative site.
If you want to recover the old nerdies who have long left the page, please consider that your audience has some technical background when writing the summaries. You could have highlighted many interesting points from the Ars Technica text (or even have found a deeper one), such as current size of advertising packets or the discussion on hardware compatibility via software upgrade.
But instead, you highlighted the only part which has no interest -- the clarification about what are *not* advertising packets. Seriously, is the focus of the summary targeting your target?
So a devise you haven't paired with can access your's via Blue-Tooth. And to make it even better, they've extended the range. This is an improvement?