Bluetooth 5 With 2x More Range and 4x Better Speed Coming Next Week (arstechnica.com) 94
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 stupid problem yet? (Score:3, 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?
Re: (Score:2)
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
Absolutely, those people are invited to move out into the wilderness and not use technology.
3X Less reliability (Score:4, Funny)
Re: (Score:2)
I really hate how rock solid previous versions were
I don't think that phrase means what you think it means.
Re: (Score:2)
Can we have 3X less reliability though please.
I don't think that phrase means what you think it means.
Editing (Score:3, 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".)
Re:Editing (Score:5, Interesting)
Re: (Score:2)
Twice the range and quadrupled throughput, surely.
Re:Editing (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?
Re: (Score:2)
You could have stopped at "Nobody says 2x more".
For 2x they say twice as much/many.
Although plenty of people do say things like "two times cheaper" (which as you indirectly point out is just plain wrong).
Re: (Score:3)
Hear hear. The common off-by-one usage is infuriating.
Mesh (Score:2)
I am missing any reference to mesh networking in the announcement [bluetooth.com]. Come one, it feels like it has been already been decades, that mesh networking is supposed to come with the next release.
Re: (Score:1)
Maybe it did [bluetooth.com]
And mesh networking will enable Bluetooth devices to connect together in networks that can cover an entire building or home, opening up home and industrial automation applications.
Re: (Score:2)
Mesh networking is the Great White Hope of IoT makers. With IPv6, you can mesh together much of the known universe.
I imagine new malware that injects itself into the mesh, much like browser ad insertions that pop up now and then (pun intended).
Yay! (Score:4, 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!
Re:Yay! (Score:4, Interesting)
Re: (Score:2)
What exactly is wrong with permanently turning it off?
Some people need Bluetooth for their use cases (Score:2)
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?
Power for USB devices (Score:2)
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-powe
Re: (Score:3)
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.
Re: (Score:2)
Yes, we realize that a device not physically connected to anything else has to have an internal power source. Thank you.
So which USB keyboards have an internal power source?
Re: (Score:2)
A USB keyboard draws a few milliamps of current at most.
How many is "a few"? And how much current does the rest of a phone or tablet draw? One would need these two figures to estimate how much using a USB keyboard reduces a mobile device's battery life compared to using a Bluetooth keyboard.
Re: (Score:2)
Do USB keyboards and USB gamepads work with iPod touch, iPhone, and iPad? Or do only Bluetooth keyboards and Bluetooth MFi gamepads work?
Power? (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.
Re: (Score:2)
greater throughput means less time in active mode, more time in deep sleep.
Re: (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 a
Re: (Score:2)
Twice the range *OR* quadruple the speed. (Score:3)
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 tr
Bah humbug (Score:2, Interesting)
Given the security issues it is unclear if more range is a good thing.
How about more security, and no Wi-Fi Direct? (Score:5, 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.
Latency (Score:2)
Re:Latency (Score:4, Informative)
You don't need 0ms. If you can keep it under 50ms it's undetectable [atsc.org] for most humans. 40ms seems to be a minimum human nervous system latency. Spiders can do 20ms, but spider music is a niche case.
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:1)
Detecting that two signals are out of phase is completely different from the amount of time it takes to process those signals.
Re: (Score:1)
Try bluetooth headphones. See if the latency matches the speakers.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:1)
it seems that Bluetooth tries to re-transmit missed packets.
That's horrible... How can a live stream keep up? There's no way to adjust caching (as in shrinking the buffer) in bluetooth?
Re: (Score:2)
AC, you can attempt a similar approach to see if that works.
All y'all, anything I could be doing better switching f
Re: (Score:2)
That is odd. I am thinking it is your BT headphones that are the issue. I have had a Blue Ant X5 stereo headset for at least 6 years and have used them with every major device and OS.
By far the best compatibility has been on MS platforms. Most recently, I am using them on my Windows Mobile 10 phone and they work flawlessly.
Re: (Score:2)
apt-X Low Latency has a round trip time of around 40 ms and extremely low jitter, compared to the default Bluetooth A2DP latency of around 150 ms with significant jitter. Audio buffering on video, MP3 players and even games is usually around this figure, sometimes even higher. They do a lot of buffering because, the bigger your buffer, the more power you save and the fewer context switches you have to make. Constantly waking up the CPU for lots and lots of little writes is less efficient than doing a big ba
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Keep in mind that only dedicated chipsets made by CSR (now part of Qualcomm) actually implement aptX. And also there is a difference of about 80-100 ms between "regular" aptX, and aptX Low Latency.
I have a pair of headphones that supports aptX but not Low Latency. The sound quality is at least as good as 256 kbps MP3, but the latency is almost as bad as regular SBC (the horrific default "required" codec in A2DP spec). The Low Latency cans I have are *noticeably* more responsive and lower latency; the differ
Re: (Score:1)
Mac OS X supports aptX. I've done the test :
- connect to an aptX capable speaker
- alt-clic the Bluetooth menu
- menu shows more details about the connection. Among them, it showed the used codec : aptX when it's used (SBC in most other cases).
The market is pretty bad in my opinion :
- CSR (owned by Qualcomm now, as you said) makes most of the sold chips. Perhaps something like 70%. But something you'd learn only after buying one of their expensive development kit is that the chip is based on a very old archit
Re: (Score:2)
and will never be == 0 ms
Nothing has 0ms latency except perhaps a hypothetical quantum computer.
Re: (Score:2)
I'd say you don't understand the speed of light.
Re: (Score:2)
Saw that one coming. :-)
More range - easier to attack (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
What do you mean not advertising as normal (Score:1)
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.
Re: (Score:2)
No need to get paranoid, yet...it's not that kind of advertising.
Advertising Channels are used for discovering devices, initiating connection and broadcasting data. For instance, when you go to pair a Bluetooth keyboard or speaker with one of your devices, advertising packets can let you see the name of the device before you've paired it so you can distinguish it from all the other Bluetooth devices that are within range.
Think, "Hi, everyone out there....I'm a (device) named (name)"
Most likely, the enhance
Twice the Range!? (Score:2)
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!
Speed is good - but more range? (Score:2)
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 batter
Re: (Score:2)
I think the idea is that you could use Bluetooth instead of WiFi for your Internet of Things, which makes you cool and hep and all that sort of stuff.
I mean, what happened to the "Personal Area Network"?
How about better handling of interference? (Score:2)
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.
Re: (Score:2)
The most expensive bluetooth set I have purchased thus far has only be 40 bucks, so I guess by headphone standards that still qualifies for the "shit" range. I have used it with both an ipad and an iphone, and I have issues with both. With the iphone, at it's worst, I literally literally (not figuratively literally) have to keep the phone no more than 24 inches away or the sound repeatedly cuts out. It's extremely variable as to when it where it happens too, so short of walking around with an RF measurin
Drive-by text message advertising (Score:2)
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.
Re: (Score:3)
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.
Twice the Range isn't Good for Me. (Score:1)
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.
What would it take to get Bluetooth "mixing"? (Score:2)
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 bluetoot
Headphones (Score:2)
Is latency still an issue? (Score:2)
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?
Re: (Score:2)
Low-latency and good sounding music don't come together in the BlueTooth world.
I've also found that there are lots of BlueTooth speakers and receiver-adapters that don't handshake at the better quality protocols and bitrates. The Logitech BlueTooth receivers work fine but most others do not.
Latency is still crap, hopefully BT 5 might alleviate the problem, but I don't see how to do that and be low power and still good sound quality.
Latency? (Score:2)
What about latency?
You know, for mice.
Please Slashdot editors (Score:2)
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 conside
Blut-Tooth (Score:1)