Bluetooth 5 to arrive by year's end with double the speed and quadruple the range

[Shawn Knight]

The Bluetooth Special Interest Group (SIG) on Thursday officially unveiled the next major revision of the global wireless standard, Bluetooth 5. To say that it’ll be far more useful is a massive understatement.

Set to arrive by the end of the year (or in early 2017 at the latest), the new standard will double the speed and quadruple the range of low energy connections while increasing the capacity of connectionless data broadcasts by 800 percent. That last bit will be especially important to the millions of Internet of Things (IoT) devices that are expected to flood the market in the coming years.

Mark Powell, executive director of the Bluetooth SIG, said there are 8.2 billion Bluetooth products in use today. The enhancements in Bluetooth 5 and planned future technical advancements, he added, means that Bluetooth will be in more than a third of all installed IoT devices by 2020.

The Bluetooth SIG also revealed that it now has more than 30,000 member companies that use its technology.

For better or for worse, Bluetooth 5 will make things like beacons even more prevalent. Patrick Connolly, principal analyst at ABI Research, notes that more than 370 million Bluetooth-enabled beacons are projected to ship by 2020. Odds are, many of those will likely be used by retail stores as part of advertising campaigns.

Image courtesy juteksk7, Shutterstock

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https://www.techspot.com/news/65241-bluetooth-5-arrive-year-end-double-speed-quadruple.html

 

[VitalyT]

Talking about all these increases, without any mentioning the projected figures for speed, capacity and distance.

It is kind of dumb to imply that whoever reads it knows those exactly for the current generation of Bluetooth.

Some articles are like political columns, trying to tell us half the truth, to avoid being quoted false statements later. Classic PR BS.

 

[mosu]

I seldom use a bluetooth earpiece only in my car while driving, so 2.1 or 3 or 4 makes no difference.Utterly futile for me.

 

[fktech]

Security improvements?

Should be standard for all TVs as most everyone adds external speakers....

 

[RustyTech]

That last bit will be especially important to the millions of Internet of Things (IoT) devices that are expected to flood the market in the coming years.

I hope that products with IoT in them will be advertised clearly....so that I would know what NOT to buy.

 

[Camikazi]

That last bit will be especially important to the millions of Internet of Things (IoT) devices that are expected to flood the market in the coming years.

I hope that products with IoT in them will be advertised clearly....so that I would know what NOT to buy.

I don't even really trust my surveillance camera (wired only, don't like WiFi ones) so I have them connected to a server that runs it's own DHCP on one port and connect cameras there only (on a separate PoE switch) and have Blue Iris on it with internet access showing the camera feeds and even that is locked down as much as I can make it locked down so it is only accessible with certain devices. Once setup I can see things on the go but there is no direct access to the cameras on the network that accesses the internet. I need to RDP into the server and access them directly on there to change any internal settings on the cameras.

 

[Beaniiman]

Did I miss the part where they mention the increase in power consumption for this new BT? If I remember correctly, the major selling point of BT is that it utilizes low power consumption for wireless communication. What's really the point if it starts consuming as much power as wifi? Seems like at that point you could just have a second wifi radio for ad-hoc connections to devices and get much better speed and range.