Bluetooth 5 will quadruple the range, double the speed • Hacker News Board

Re: Bluetooth 5 will quadruple the range, double the speed

#161

Post by gman99 » Tue, Jun 28, 2016, 2:27 PM UTC

gtirloni wrote: post #150

theGimp wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's just gratuitously negative and dismissive. Bluetooth 4 is actually not bad at all in my experience. Pairing is painless relative to old versions; sound quality is flawless; connections are quite reliable. The "strain" is to be expected around other devices since Bluetooth uses 2.4GHz, a very crowded band. I can't speak to the technical bits since I never looked at them, but my experience as a consumer has been…

> sound quality is flawless; I have a headset that supports Bluetooth 3 only and audio quality is bad (especially while making calls where it chooses the HFP profile which is the only one where the mic is available). I vouched to never again buy any Bluetooth audio devices. Are you saying Bluetooth 4 would actually solve my problem? Should I still have hope?

>Are you saying Bluetooth 4 would actually solve my problem

Make sure your headset and device (phone?) both support HFP1.6 or above (which supports wideband speech/HD voice) which makes the sound quality semi-decent

Re: Bluetooth 5 will quadruple the range, double the speed

#162

Post by TheSoftwareGuy » Tue, Jun 28, 2016, 2:27 PM UTC

rhinoceraptor wrote: post #134

jacobolus wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple’s stylus has a pretty effective and reliable pairing method: just briefly plug it into the tablet. Too bad this method can’t be more generally used.

Even with the Apple pencil, the pairing reliability is not great. Every time I disable Bluetooth on my iPad, I have to re-pair. I'm surprised they didn't use some custom protocol, especially given how bad Bluetooth is, and they control the entire software and hardware stack.

probably because the hardware for bluetooth stacks have gotten crazy small and efficient. I doubt even apple could recreate it without straight up acquiring a company that already can do it.

Re: Bluetooth 5 will quadruple the range, double the speed

#163

Post by jerluc » Tue, Jun 28, 2016, 2:29 PM UTC

Niksko wrote: post #49

Working with Bluetooth on a project last year was a gigantic pain in the ass. Linux support was reasonably good, though with bizarre quirks and changes of tooling between libbluetooth versions. OSX was a total nightmare. The project is currently stalled because three days before I had to head off (I was doing all of the programming and troubleshooting on the software side) my collaborators decided to inform me that t…

Depending on how much data you need to transfer between the two devices, I'd highly recommend a pair of ZigBee radios for low-bandwidth (<250k), super-low-power applications. Specifically using a pair of XBee (series 1) radios in "transparent" mode, you get what looks like a serial device on either end. When used with a USB dongle, you can simply write your code to use basic ioctl ops on the USB device file, which works well across most POSIX platforms.

Re: Bluetooth 5 will quadruple the range, double the speed

#164

Post by jerluc » Tue, Jun 28, 2016, 2:35 PM UTC

jamesrom wrote: post #27

Bluetooth is very easy to hate. It never ever just works: the pairing rituals, the flakiness. It's annoying. But in recent years it has become more and more invisible. You've probably used Bluetooth in the past 12 months without noticing. Invisibility is something that the Bluetooth SIG should strive for.

If anything, it would seem that (from these comments and from my own personal experiences) Bluetooth is actually not doing very well at being invisible at all.

Re: Bluetooth 5 will quadruple the range, double the speed

#165

Post by rcthompson » Tue, Jun 28, 2016, 2:37 PM UTC

nwah1 wrote: post #155

creativeembassy wrote: post #140

I could not care less. - 1.0 to 1.2: Hard to pair, and very unreliable. First major version, I'm sure they'll fix it... - 2.0: More bandwidth. Still hard to pair, still unreliable. - 2.1: Adds "Simple Secure Pairing". Still hard to actually pair. Still unreliable. - 3.0: More bandwidth. More features. Still hard to pair, still unreliable. - 4.0: Bluetooth Low Energy released. Still hard to pair, still unreliable. - 4…

"Bluetooth 5 Promises an End to Pairing The power of Bluetooth is set to explode when the next version of the wireless technology is released at the turn of the year. Bluetooth 5 will offer eight times the broadcasting capacity, have four times the range, and run twice as fast as current Bluetooth technology, the organization responsible for development of Bluetooth announced on Thursday. The increased broadcasting c…

That's like saying that we can improve office communication by having everyone yell louder so everyone else can hear them.

Re: Bluetooth 5 will quadruple the range, double the speed

#166

Post by nwah1 » Tue, Jun 28, 2016, 2:39 PM UTC

rcthompson wrote: post #165

nwah1 wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Bluetooth 5 Promises an End to Pairing The power of Bluetooth is set to explode when the next version of the wireless technology is released at the turn of the year. Bluetooth 5 will offer eight times the broadcasting capacity, have four times the range, and run twice as fast as current Bluetooth technology, the organization responsible for development of Bluetooth announced on Thursday. The increased broadcasting c…

That's like saying that we can improve office communication by having everyone yell louder so everyone else can hear them.

My understanding is that the anonymous broadcasting has been boosted, which may enable more interesting types of device handshaking abilities. It is not merely that the bandwidth has improved, as in the past.

Re: Bluetooth 5 will quadruple the range, double the speed

#167

Post by rcthompson » Tue, Jun 28, 2016, 2:42 PM UTC

creativeembassy wrote: post #140

I could not care less. - 1.0 to 1.2: Hard to pair, and very unreliable. First major version, I'm sure they'll fix it... - 2.0: More bandwidth. Still hard to pair, still unreliable. - 2.1: Adds "Simple Secure Pairing". Still hard to actually pair. Still unreliable. - 3.0: More bandwidth. More features. Still hard to pair, still unreliable. - 4.0: Bluetooth Low Energy released. Still hard to pair, still unreliable. - 4…

I couldn't agree more. I have never used a Bluetooth device that didn't have connection issues at least daily. And that's not even taking into account the madness of pairing a device with multiple other devices (e.g. phone & PC) or the fact that you can't use USB and Bluetooth at the same time, because USB3 jams the 2.4GHz frequency. If USB and Bluetooth are going to be mutually exclusive, I know which one I'm going to pick. (But that doesn't mean that making USB3 jam 2.4GHz WiFi & BT wasn't an idiotic design choice, so much so that I wonder if it wasn't an intentional attempt at killing competition.)

Re: Bluetooth 5 will quadruple the range, double the speed

#168

Post by CaptSpify » Tue, Jun 28, 2016, 2:46 PM UTC

Unklejoe wrote: post #132

You know there's a problem when a majority of the comments (on a website filled with software engineers and other technologically inclined people) are all claiming that Bluetooth simply sucks in terms of usability. Imagine how hard it would be for someone like my parents to debug a Bluetooth pairing issue. I think they need to focus 100% of their efforts on addressing some of these issues which seem to have been a pr…

In my experience, if the implementation is wrong often enough that most people think the procotol/spec are to blame, than the protocol/spec are usually too complicated.

Re: Bluetooth 5 will quadruple the range, double the speed

#169

Post by KevinEldon » Tue, Jun 28, 2016, 2:56 PM UTC

creativeembassy wrote: post #140

I could not care less. - 1.0 to 1.2: Hard to pair, and very unreliable. First major version, I'm sure they'll fix it... - 2.0: More bandwidth. Still hard to pair, still unreliable. - 2.1: Adds "Simple Secure Pairing". Still hard to actually pair. Still unreliable. - 3.0: More bandwidth. More features. Still hard to pair, still unreliable. - 4.0: Bluetooth Low Energy released. Still hard to pair, still unreliable. - 4…

That's not my experience at all. My Magic keyboard and mouse work fine. I've used them with my Mac mini and my Macbook without any problems. They paired without any trouble. Pairing my phone with my car was a pain, but I've got an after-market Bluetooth adapter so you have to press the 3 button on the radio or something to pair the first time. After that it just worked.

Re: Bluetooth 5 will quadruple the range, double the speed

#170

Post by josho » Tue, Jun 28, 2016, 3:05 PM UTC

BinaryIdiot wrote: post #70

micheljansen wrote: post #69

That's nice, but the biggest UX problem with Bluetooth is still the pairing misery. It's 2016 and it's still nearly impossible to use any one Bluetooth device with multiple other devices. Try switching a Bluetooth headset from an iPhone to a Mac or convincing your car to switch from one phone to another. It's a huge mess and its not just a matter of the technology not working as designed. These are fundamental proble…

I couldn't agree more. I have a set of headphones that I love using with my phone and several computers. It's such an annoyance to connect it from one to the other and it doesn't appear that ANYONE is even working on making this better anymore. There was that brief period where some bluetooth devices included NFC where you could take it to the device to pair which was actually interesting but it only happened to such…

It strikes me as a software problem in the device, not a bluetooth limitation.

For example, some devices that I have pair only to a single peer, while others have no problems switching between several, while another device is limited to two peers--requiring a reset if you want a third.

I suggest that anyone buying a bluetooth device test out pairing between multiple devices and if the device makes you jump through hopes to switch between bluetooth peers then immediately return it.