What Is Bluetooth 5.0?

This year, all the top phones will support Bluetooth 5, the latest Bluetooth standard specifications. It has a lot of major improvements including Bluetooth speed, Bluetooth range, radio interference, bandwidth and broadcast messages. These will allow new uses for Bluetooth that will not require devices to connect directly to each other and will be much easier. Bluetooth has said they want to focus more on "internet of things" smart devices, which these new specifications support.

In this blog post, we are going to talk about Bluetooth 5. You may have heard about it especially in the most recent phones like the Galaxy S8, the Note 8 and of course the most recent iPhone 8 and you may be wondering what are the differences between Bluetooth 5 and the previous versions because there are a lot of big improvements and it should be pretty exciting even if you don’t really know much about Bluetooth but we are going to go over that.

Bluetooth 5 which is the successor to the previous 4.2 Bluetooth. Bluetooth 5 doesn’t have the 5.X number notation. It’s now just Bluetooth 5 instead of 5.0. They dropped all that to make it easier to understand which kind of make sense because before it was 4.0 4.1 4.1. Most people probably had no idea what the heck the difference was so should be easier to follow from now on. Of course, we probably care more about the exciting stuff like the technical aspects.

First of all, Bluetooth 5 is going to have twice (2X) the bandwidth of the regular 4.2 that you might be used to. So before it was only 1mbps bandwidth and that was in ideal situations. Now, it’s 2 Mbps! Still not a lot – you will expect it to be more.

Also in addition to that, it is going to have larger data packets which just means there is going to have to be fewer transmissions hopefully that just means faster connections again but it doesn’t now only has the bandwidth increased but also has the range. Bluetooth 5 has 4 times (4x) the range as Bluetooth 4.2 and so that is going to be about 30 to 50 meters and this is with the same power requirements.

One of the main reasons why Bluetooth 5 has that much-improved range is because it has better interference handling. So you may not know that Bluetooth uses basically the same spectrum as everything else 2.4GHZ. So it’s pretty crowded with all the routers and so many other devices but this time it uses a few different techniques to make sure it uses the least interfered channel. So it can select from different bands and say well this part of the spectrum is not as crowded right now and it will transmit using that as opposed to a more crowded channel all the time and just sticking with that. A lot of routers do this with auto selection and this is a little bit different than Wi-Fi channels so maybe it will use bands in between the WI-FI channels, overall it’s just going to be of a better range.

Also it is going to use a technique called Forward Error Correction (FEC) which is a type of error correction that deals with interference in wireless signals and the idea is it just uses redundancy so perhaps if it sends a little bit of signal and it is a little bit corrupted, something else will come along with it that will be able to repair that signal on the other end maybe without having to have that other device send a signal back saying oh can you resend back cause it didn’t work! It won’t have to do that anymore.

One of the most exciting changes though is, Bluetooth 5 now has eight times (8x) the capacity for broadcast messages. Broadcast messages kind of like it suggests is a message that is sent out by a Bluetooth device that is connectionless; it is not meant to necessarily connect directly between devices. It is just kind of like a message that is broadcasted out and this can have more capacity. Bluetooth 5.0 is going to redefine the way Bluetooth transmits information.

Another very interesting purpose is so-called beak-in functions which I think are very interesting but also a double edge sword. So the idea with this is you have a beak-in device which just kind of seats there and broadcasting out with these broadcast messages. Does not expect to have anything connect to it but it is proximity based. So if you have a device that supports or has these beak-in things enabled, then when you walk by it within a certain range, then it will do something - maybe it will send a push notification to your phone.

Bluetooth can now be used more between smart devices instead of just your phone and the device 1 to 1. So I guess the idea here is now to kind of use Bluetooth more as a whole protocol like a mesh network almost for inside your home that will be like an alternative to WI-FI because as you know right now if you want to connect smart devices, usually you will have to connect them all at the same Wi-Fi point and they talk to each other in that way. Maybe with this, you won’t have to do that or rely on Wi-Fi signal – it can just be directly between the devices but it does not have to only connect between these devices if that makes sense.

So let me know what you think down in the comment section and again share by tapping on the social share icons.

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What Is Bluetooth 5.0?