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Bluetooth 5 to Double Speed, Quadruple Range

posted by Fnord666 on Thursday December 08 2016, @07:23PM   Printer-friendly
from the wasn't-bluetooth-a-pirate? dept.

takyon writes:

The new Bluetooth specification will supposedly allow devices to double the speed and quadruple the range compared to Bluetooth 4:

The Bluetooth Special Interest Group (SIG) announced that the next version of its nigh-ubiquitous wireless technology is now available.

Bluetooth 5 boasts many improvements over its predecessor. It's said to offer twice the speed, four times the range, and eight times the broadcasting message capacity of Bluetooth 4. This new version is also supposed to work better while other wireless signals like Wi-Fi are active. All of these improvements combine to allow Internet of Things (IoT) devices and other connected products to be far more reliable than they were in the past.

Also at CNET, The Verge, and Engadget.

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  • (Score: 2) by stormwyrm on Thursday December 08 2016, @10:27PM

    by stormwyrm (717) on Thursday December 08 2016, @10:27PM (#438894) Journal
    Is this double the speed, quadruple the range and perhaps triple the power consumption? Mobile device batteries already have too short a life as it is. I read nothing in any of the articles touching on power usage, except for a brief mention about how the new standard has no updates to Bluetooth LE. Lower power was essentially the only thing setting it apart from Wi-Fi, and I thought that it was supposed to be a 'personal area network' for which short range was the whole point.
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  • (Score: 2) by takyon on Thursday December 08 2016, @10:55PM

    by takyon (881) <takyonNO@SPAMsoylentnews.org> on Thursday December 08 2016, @10:55PM (#438905) Journal

    We'll find out. Probably every new smartphone released in the next year or two will have Bluetooth 5, and then laptops and peripherals a year or two after that.

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  • (Score: 1) by andersjm on Friday December 09 2016, @06:07PM

    by andersjm (3931) on Friday December 09 2016, @06:07PM (#439277)

    From the BT5 FAQ:

    Bandwidth can be decreased to achieve up to 4x longer range while maintaining similar power requirements.

    My impression is that the improvement in BT5 is some sort of configurability: The power levels are the same as before, but you can trade bandwidth for range or vice versa.