Slashdot Mirror


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.

18 of 94 comments (clear)

  1. Have they fixed the stupid problem yet? by bluefoxlucid · · Score: 2, Funny

    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?

  2. 3X Less reliability by Nethemas+the+Great · · Score: 3, Funny

    Can we have 3X less reliability though please. I really hate how rock solid previous versions were.

    --
    Two of my imaginary friends reproduced once ... with negative results.
  3. Editing by sexconker · · Score: 2, Insightful

    "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".)

    1. Re:Editing by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

      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.

    2. Re:Editing by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Interesting

      "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?

    3. Re:Editing by Wootery · · Score: 2

      Hear hear. The common off-by-one usage is infuriating.

  4. Yay! by Opportunist · · Score: 3, Funny

    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.
    1. Re:Yay! by NMBob · · Score: 3, Interesting

      ...and maybe that NSA van following me will be able to back off. I'm afraid they are going to rear end me.

  5. Power? by phorm · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

    1. Re:Power? by phorm · · Score: 2

      Most bluetooth devices I know are used for streaming rather than file transfer. You might get better quality audio with higher speeds (or be able to use the devices farther apart), but you're not going to have more sleep cycles with a continuous 128mbps audio stream to a set of bluetooth headphones, etc.

      In cases where data is transferred in large chunks and/or buffered that might work ok, but I don't personally know many things that do this other than when I'm doing an OTA update of a tethered device such as my Pebble.

  6. Bah humbug by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Given the security issues it is unclear if more range is a good thing.

  7. How about more security, and no Wi-Fi Direct? by mlts · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

  8. More range - easier to attack by sinij · · Score: 2

    Bluetooth is notoriously insecure, longer range and more effective discovery would only make attacks easier.

  9. Re:Latency by bill_mcgonigle · · Score: 3, Informative

    You don't need 0ms. If you can keep it under 50ms it's undetectable for most humans. 40ms seems to be a minimum human nervous system latency. Spiders can do 20ms, but spider music is a niche case.

    --
    My God, it's Full of Source!
    OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
  10. Re:Latency by malignant_minded · · Score: 2

    Well if you played two songs 50 ms off from each other I'm sure you could detect that it is off.

  11. Twice the range *OR* quadruple the speed. by Pizza · · Score: 2

    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.
  12. Re:Drive-by text message advertising by GlennC · · Score: 2

    I don't know for sure, but I'd guess that they have a micro-cell in the store. When your phone registers with the cell (since it's the closest VZW cell to you), Verizon sends the text to you via standard SMS.

    --
    Go on, citizen, stamp the vote card. R or D, your choice.
  13. Re:Power for USB devices by farble1670 · · Score: 2

    Bluetooth human interface devices are self-powered, that is, they're powered by a battery inside the device.

    Yes, we realize that a device not physically connected to anything else has to have an internal power source. Thank you.

    Finally, Bluetooth headphones pose less of a strangulation risk during exercise than corded headphones.

    Being strangled by headphones is nothing more than natural selection at work.