
Bluetooth 5 Now Available - vadimbaryshev
https://www.bluetooth.com/news/pressreleases/2016/12/07/bluetooth-5-now-available
======
BinaryIdiot
Considering every phone I've tested (iPhone 5S, iPhone 6+, Samsung Note, Moto
X, Nexus 6P) with 7 different bluetooth headphones (ranging from cheap Amazon
ones to expensive LG) I have NEVER found a phone, paired with headphones, that
stayed connected especially when the phone is in my side pocket and I'm
walking in an open space which seems to make connectivity significantly worse.

For instance getting on the BART being an enclosed space? I never have an
issue. All of the headphones I've tested stay connected the entire time
without issue. The SECOND I walk out of the station, even in the city, every
pair of headphones I've tried work _most_ of the time but typically cut out
once every 30 seconds or so. But it's crazy inconsistent because I managed to
walk to my office, once, the entire way without it disconnecting.

Seeing as bluetooth 5 helps with range I'm hope I can finally using it to keep
my phone in my side pocket and actually listen to my headphones,
uninterrupted.

~~~
pdx
Getting 2.4GHz through the human body is hard. The human body is mostly water,
and bluetooth is, after all, the same frequency of your microwave oven, which
uses 2.4GHz because it's in a band of frequencies from 1-20GHz that water
absorbs.

When you're indoors, you don't need to get bluetooth through your body. You're
getting reflections off of nearby walls and ceilings which allow your
bluetooth devices to communicate across your body, but without going through
your body.

When you're outdoors, you no longer enjoy the benefit of reflected RF, and the
design of the phone and the headset antennas needs to be very good, so the RF
can make it through your body.

It is a hard problem, but a lot of headset manufacturers do achieve it. I'm
surprised you still haven't found one that's acceptable. Of course, it's body
dependent. Petite women will have less issues then large men, as the RF just
has less water to travel through with them.

Today's bluetooth is limited to 4dBm max transmit power for class 2. Bluetooth
5 will be 20dBm, which is a lot more power. This is, actually, the same power
that class 1 bluetooth devices now have, so I'm unsure why they brag about the
higher power of bluetooth 5, but to be sure, most bluetooth devices now are
not class 1.

The higher power will make even bad antenna engineers be able to get bluetooth
through your body, but more importantly, you'll enjoy larger range when you
are at the gym or in your home. Also, if you worry about RF effects on the
human body, your worry can increase now as well!

~~~
pselbert
This was a magnificent explanation, and precisely the kind of comment I hope
for when reading HN. Thank you for taking the time to share.

~~~
Thimothy
If I were you, I'd try to forget it as soon as I can, becouse it's wrong. 2.4
GHz is not in the water absortion band (I'd show you a nice graph, but I can't
find one that goes to such low frequencies), a microwave would work as nicely
in 1 GHz or 5 GHz, what matters is the H-O bonds, that are esentially electric
dipoles and are excited when high-ish frequency and power hits them. You
probably have noticed that fat heats much faster than wattr in the microwave
oven, that is becouse is full of OH bonds, just as the GP is full of shit[1].

This is one of those moments when I wonder if most of the things I have
learned in HN are bullshit, I'm usually struck with awe at the sapience of the
HN hivemind too, but in times like this...

[1][https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_common_misconceptions#...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_common_misconceptions#Food_and_cooking)

~~~
danieltillett
I don't think your comment is very constructive, but more importantly what the
OP actually said is not wrong.

------
Analemma_
Seeing a new Bluetooth version is like being a fan of a perennially losing
sports team. You hope that "Maybe this is year they finally get it together!",
but deep down you know they won't. The three certain things in life are death,
taxes, and Bluetooth being flaky.

~~~
kraftman
What do they not have together?

------
lasryaric
Why is general bluetooth connectivity so "buggy"? Why am I always struggling
connecting my iPhone 6s to my bose bluetooth speaker? I would love to
understand that.

~~~
thearn4
I think we'd need an RF engineer to answer this more thoroughly, but it's my
understanding that there are a lot of materials capable of absorbing the low-
energy microwaves that it uses as its transmission medium.

Water is a big one, which I think is one reason that having my phone in my
back pocket almost always results in a dropped connection to my headphones
over the course of working outside for a few hours, compared to my side or
front jacket pocket. Too much water in our tissues.

~~~
bjt2n3904
Hi! RF Engineer here. Bluetooth sucks for a number of reasons, only a few of
which actually relate to RF.

First, we're bad at naming things. Is it BLE? Bluetooth Smart? BTLE? Bluetooth
4.0, or Bluetooth 4 Low Energy? And what does this have to do with ANT+? This
doesn't seem to be a big problem, but it's a sign of deeper problems with the
spec. In the long run it makes it very difficult for developers to implement.

Bluetooth 2.0 is radically different from BTLE. In 2.0, you had one device
which acts like a microphone, and another device which acts like a speaker.
This was like getting two people to dance together, it takes a lot of practice
to get the joined movements right. If one person stumbles, it all goes down
like dominoes.

BTLE on the other hand, acts like a (more familiar) client server model. You
come up to the bank teller, and have a limited set of operations you can
preform (withdraw/deposit money, open/close account). Here's the catch
though... the teller is only open for 10 seconds during a 24 hour day, and
moves throughout the city. You have to arrive at just the right time, or you
have to wait until tomorrow. (This was done for battery saving.) The
throughput is also MUCH slower than 2.0, which makes applications like audio
out of the question for now.

There's also a lot of bureaucratic hype surrounding it. If you look at the
release from the BT SIG, it seems very much similar to Java's claim that it
runs on a bajillion devices. All in all, BTLE seems to be a solution in search
of an IoT related problem, much like Java.

So in short, the reason I think it sucks is because it's a very complicated
protocol with poor and confusing naming conventions. It sure doesn't help that
it keeps getting re-invented! (Although BT5 seems to just be add-ons,
finally!) Implementers (both on the HW side and the mobile/desktop side) have
a difficult time figuring out how to do things correctly, much less why they
need to be done. Things are getting better, but until the next "killer BTLE"
application comes out, it's just heart rate monitors and useless iBeacons.

~~~
agumonkey
You worked on BT specs ? BT seems an acute case of design by comittee. It's
huge, full of profiles and corners. Nobody implements it really well,
everything moves before it's finished. Makes you dream of wires some times.

~~~
jburgess777
I was involved in the 1.0 Bluetooth specifications and can confirm it was
"designed by committee". IIRC the original wireless specification came from
either Nokia or Ericsson and they drove a lot of the initial development. They
had already developed the RF technology before the Bluetooth SIG was even
formed. The original stated goal for Bluetooth was "cable replacement".
Features such as pairing a headset to a phone, or a phone to a laptop were an
essential part of the original profiles.

A reason for the complexity was that the BT 1.0 profiles often leveraged
existing technology, for example:

\- RFCOMM was a way of sending arbitrary serial data, reusing RS232 comms
which were very common.

\- OBEX was a way of sending data which was previously sent over IrDA

\- The "LAN access profile" basically said "use RFCOMM to do PPP over a serial
link like you do with a modem"

If you tried to implement any of these from scratch then not only do you have
to implement the BT part, you also have to implement the technologies that BT
reused.

If you look at the initial SIG members, Nokia and Ericsson took care of the
initial phone developments. Intel, IBM, Microsoft and Toshiba represented the
PC side of things. I was working for 3Com at the time and we were interested
in it as a short range network technology. 3Com developed a network device
conforming to the "LAN access profile" but it was never released. 3Com also
owned Palm and they were interested in incorporating BT with the hand held
devices.

It is interesting to compare BT to Wireless Ethernet (IEEE 802.11) world. The
IEEE Ethernet (802.3) specifications are pretty much only concerned with
getting data packets from A to B at layers 0 through 2. At layer 3 and above
they don't care if those packets are IPv4, IPv6 or some other protocol like
IPX.

Bluetooth tried to define everything from the the RF communications all the
way up to the application layer. The specification mentions how to the PIN
code request should be presented to the user when authorizing a new
connection. It also mentions which audio codecs should be supported for
streaming audio. The BT profiles also tried to define how to transfer files,
business cards or print documents.

These detailed application layer specifications simply don't exist in
something like Ethernet. There might be an argument that BT tried to over
specify things but it was attempting to give a level of interoperability which
we still struggle to achieve over other networks.

~~~
agumonkey
Yeah, that's how it felt, they provided an out of the box full stack. Maybe
this AND the field it lived in, cellphones as opposed to computers, made it
too hard to do right. Cellphones changed a lot since the BT 1.0 days, instead
of implementing gradual layers, you have to deliver a monolith..

------
neals
2x the speed.

4x the range.

8x the capacity "to send messages"

Not using the x.x versioning anymore. Just Bluetooth 5 and the next will be 6.

Also, apprently, there's 30.000 companies in the 'Bluetooth Special Interests
Group' ?

[Thanks Krasin, gerardnll for correcting me]

~~~
inopinatus
Does Bluetooth 5 improve the reliability, latency, or the UX? I didn't need
more speed, range or capacity from Bluetooth. But I did want it to cease being
synonymous in my household with lag, dropouts and pairing failures.

~~~
Navarr
well I mean, 4x range bumps it to over 100 ft, where as it used to be 30
right? (Or am I just out of date?)

But lag and dropouts is definitely my same concern with Bluetooth as well..

That said, it's still my preference if only because it's a standard - but it's
getting damn hard to find decent Bluetooth mice now

~~~
Someone
4x range also may mean you get interference from 16x the number of other
devices. In a frequency band where everyone and their dog broadcast
([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_2.4_GHz_radio_use](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_2.4_GHz_radio_use)),
that may not be a net win.

------
Twirrim
Haven't look at the spec yet, but curious if they've improved the security
side of communications.

edit: Here's what I'm referring to, bluetooth 4 LE mode is vulnerable to
certain attacks:
[https://lacklustre.net/bluetooth/Ryan_Bluetooth_Low_Energy_U...](https://lacklustre.net/bluetooth/Ryan_Bluetooth_Low_Energy_USENIX_WOOT.pdf)

[https://pomcor.com/2015/06/03/has-bluetooth-become-
secure/](https://pomcor.com/2015/06/03/has-bluetooth-become-secure/)

~~~
lucb1e
I was not aware of this[1], thanks for linking. Do you know whether the same
is true for non-LE connections? I always thought those were secure, provided
there are no bugs in the implementations.

[1] The paper's conclusion summarizes very nicely, though they write it
formally and a little confusingly: the thing is utterly broken. They can read
contents, even if they key exchange was not observed/captured, and they can
inject traffic. Basically it's obfuscated plain text.

~~~
bjt2n3904
The non-LE protocol has been pretty difficult to breach from the hacker-
hobbyist level. The communication protocol is incredibly complex, and the
hardware simply doesn't exist to interface well with it. A lot of BT2.0 (ie:
non LE) "security" comes from the fact it's just darn hard to interface with
it.

~~~
lucb1e
That sounds weird, given that it's in so many devices. It runs on a normal
frequency and is implemented in billions of devices, how is it hard to
interface with?

~~~
IshKebab
You probably need low-level access to crack the security. Your average
Bluetooth dongle won't provide that.

------
FrenchyJiby
Anyone have a good introduction to Bluetooth ~4.0 + reasonable documentation ?

I've always loved bluetooth, the concept of P2P file exchange got me through
high school[1] to think about all the levels of tech involved in making your
music shared with someone else's phone, but very let down by the documentation
and implementation aspect.

As a curious hacker who would like to decentralize his life, I've always
wanted to start programming stuff over Bluetooth for any task (remove
dependency on internet for purely-local services). But when I tried actually
doing so, I was met with an incredibly complex ecosystem I couldn't find RFCs
for (or Russian equivalent), with only Bluez as partial reference [2].

I got the impression that if you're not some deep pocketed company or are
doing something with phones (preferably with IoT as key buzzword), you're not
welcome to the Bluetooth(®) club.

[1] My first bluetooth headset, a Jabra BT620s, bought for 30€ online, is
still functional (if a little beaten) after 14 years, delivering about 6 hours
of music streaming before recharge. I had to use earbuds recently for a
project, and got myself really crossed with the wires thing. How pampered I
have been !

[2] At the time I was interested in using BTLE with a linux laptop that
clearly supported it, and a flagship Nexus 5. I gave up when I realised at the
time, Bluez had only command line tools to access the Low Energy stuff, and
some guy had to reverse-engineer the binaries to access some level of API. I
really hope this changed/changes.

~~~
wsetchell
[https://people.csail.mit.edu/albert/bluez-
intro/c54.html](https://people.csail.mit.edu/albert/bluez-intro/c54.html) is a
great intro.

Reading the code here is a good second step.
[https://github.com/sandeepmistry/noble](https://github.com/sandeepmistry/noble)

After you've gone through those, the bluetooth spec is useful for specific
questions.

------
drey08
Has anyone here had issues with bluetooth interference from.. traffic lights?

My Sennheiser Momentum wireless headphones seem to be running into this issue.
It doesn't happen all the time, but when it does I notice it happens when the
traffic lights switch (e.g green to red). There must be some kind of signal
interfering with bluetooth that's emitted at that point, though I can't
understand why since all traffic lights should be wired, to my knowledge.

For reference this is in Berlin, Germany. Perhaps it's something to do with
the traffic tech they use in Germany.

~~~
askvictor
An increasing number of roads administrations use Bluetooth to track traffic
movement. They can get a signature of a car at one intersection, and track
that car as it moves through the city. I guess they look for any Bluetooth
device in the area. Supposedly it's anonymized, but you never know. I know
they do this in Sydney Australia, not certain where else.

~~~
joshschreuder
Interesting, I'm in Melbourne and at least once I got interference when I was
crossing at an intersection. Maybe that's why.

------
mrpippy
Related: Nordic Semi nRF52840 announced today, with BT 5 support and
additional on-board peripherals (including ZigBee)

[https://www.nordicsemi.com/eng/Products/nRF52840](https://www.nordicsemi.com/eng/Products/nRF52840)

------
Sephr
Still no audio profile that supports Opus. Why are we still using a 20 year
old audio codec (SBC) for Bluetooth speakers?

Opus is low enough bitrate that it could even theoretically be used over BLE
(ignoring latency problems), while still wiping the floor with SBC.

Regardless of whether BLE transport is possible, it depresses me that Opus
support still hasn't been added to the A2DP.

~~~
rasz_pl
We got brand new 25 year old codec now! PATENTED and owned by Qualcomm

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AptX](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AptX)

~~~
DiThi
I tried to use that and after I received an expensive aptX-LL capable receiver
I found out my Google Pixel doesn't support aptX!

I've been wanting an Opus powered headset too, for years. Maybe someone can
make a non-A2DP opus receiver and some type of virtual audio device in PC and
Android?

------
legulere
> Bluetooth 5 continues to advance the Internet of Things (IoT) experience by
> enabling simple and effortless interactions across the vast range of
> connected devices.

What I guess is missing for Bluetooth IoT are standard profiles for IoT
devices. Currently there are almost only products which speak their own
protocol and need their own app. The only thing that comes a bit close to a
standard is HomeKit by Apple that also works over Bluetooth, but it's closed
and only Elgato managed to imlement it:
[http://www.forbes.com/sites/aarontilley/2015/07/21/whats-
the...](http://www.forbes.com/sites/aarontilley/2015/07/21/whats-the-hold-up-
for-apples-homekit/#7c4a10b3322b)

It's kind of sad, because bluetooth seems to be the right protocol for this:

\- it's supported by almost all devices (contrary to zigbee which needs a
bridge)

\- it's not totally broken in regards to local security like zigbee

\- it keeps IoT devices in a local network where they belong in contrast to
the WiFi IoT devices that form a botnet

\- it takes less power than wifi

------
wyager
Wow, this press release is horrible. Full of useless business jargon. Ctrl+F
"IoT": 9 results. Why do they write these things? The only people who care
about bluetooth press releases are tech-literate enough to understand at least
mildly useful information about the new standard.

~~~
amelius
Yes. I'd love to hear what modulation scheme they use. Or what kind of network
protocols they support. But also more basic things like: is it now possible to
pair multiple headphones with a single player device?

------
lowglow
As someone who is building an applied AI hardware product, what can we expect
from BT5 ?

> Key feature updates include four times range, two times speed, and eight
> times broadcast message capacity. Longer range powers whole home and
> building coverage, for more robust and reliable connections. Higher speed
> enables more responsive, high-performance devices. Increased broadcast
> message size increases the data sent for improved and more context relevant
> solutions.

When will the chips be shipping anyone know?

~~~
audunw
Keep an eye out for this. Should be available very soon

[https://www.nordicsemi.com/eng/Products/nRF52840](https://www.nordicsemi.com/eng/Products/nRF52840)

~~~
azdle
Dev kits seem to already be available:
[http://www.digikey.com/short/3594m8](http://www.digikey.com/short/3594m8)

------
btreecat
With no mention of audio/music improvements, I am not hopeful this release
will do more than continue down the same path.

------
drak0n1c
Here is the Core v5 Spec PDF (26mb with 2822 pages)
[https://www.bluetooth.org/DocMan/handlers/DownloadDoc.ashx?d...](https://www.bluetooth.org/DocMan/handlers/DownloadDoc.ashx?doc_id=421043&_ga=1.9726513.560532406.1481142849)

------
matt_wulfeck
I wonder why 802.11ah isn't getting much industry love. It has a range of 1km!
That's enough to cover an entire home and yard with "good enough" low-
bandwidth coverage. Combine this with a mesh network and we could get very
large private networks without many devices.

~~~
y04nn
It's very new, I don't know if the standard is finalized yet and I don't think
there is many chip for it and if there are, the price is probably prohibitive.

------
sandworm101
Oh great. More powerful transmitters at 2.4, and everyone is wearing at least
a couple of them. I just got my wifi channels sorted. Talk about range and
connectivity all you want. 2.4 can only take so much before everything starts
fighting with everything else.

And KSP just updated too.

------
pksadiq
Is Bluetooth 5 compatible with 4.x? That is, can a Bluetooth 4.x Central
connect to 5 Peripheral (or vice versa)?

Does anybody know the power usage (idle, advertising, data transferring, etc.)
of BT 5 compared to BT 4.x LE?

Thanks

------
csours
I should have asked this earlier, but is there a good diagram/discussion of
the steps to attach bluetooth audio?

------
johnhenry
What's the likelihood that this can be an update to existing products so I
don't have to buy all new hardware?

~~~
fra
I would say 0 chance. Vendors typically need to rev silicon to support new
bluetooth releases.

------
sliken
Hopefully this finally means lossless audio.

------
kylehotchkiss
Is this one still going to change pitches several times in the middle of the
song with top of the line hardware?

------
moron4hire
I cannot think of a single way in which Bluetooth has changed my life. Of the
Bluetooth devices I have, I do exactly the same things I've always done, just
with slightly more annoyance.

My smartphone let me answer emails and burning questions on the go, while also
letting me give up my car. My VR headset is making me completely rethink what
User Experience means to the point of making the current usage of the term UX
just downright laughable.

But that's actually beside the point. I don't actually need Bluetooth to
_change_ my life. I need it to get rid of the wires in my life.

And if it worked as advertised, I could do that. But Bluetooth devices...
they're just always a tad sucky. And the ways in which they just feel bad is
in the secret society handshake of doom you have to do every time you want to
use the device because it's 2016 and for some reason my devices still can't
reliably pair with multiple other devices.

And then once they are connected, the latency in the communication almost
makes them useless. I can't use Bluetooth headphones to play games, which is
usually when I want to wear headphones. I can't use Bluetooth in any of my
motion tracking wearable hardware prototypes, which is ostensibly the sort of
thing Bluetooth wants to cover.

Something that might work for me: decouple the Bluetooth pairing from the host
computer. Make it a part of the dongle. Make a dongle that is basically the
wireless equivalent of a USB hub, and it's to _that_ that I pair my devices.
I'd be happy to bring that dongle with me everywhere I bring my Bluetooth
devices. That might actually let me use my Bluetooth mouse on my home PC, on
my laptop, and on my work PC.

Finally, would someone please design a decent, full-sized keyboard, with
Bluetooth support.

~~~
jwr
BLE devices actually tend to work quite well. If you try a Logitech MX Master
Mouse, or an Apple Pencil, or a Microsoft mobile keyboard, you will find that
they all perform very well. And most importantly, the dreaded "pairing" is
only done once, ever.

~~~
spiderfarmer
My MX master needs to be paired at least a few times per week. It also doesn't
wake up my Macbook Pro reliably. It sucks because other than that I love both
devices.

~~~
stronglikedan
I would check the software (as others have suggested) on the MBP side of
things. I'm on Win 10 on a Dell M3800, and I haven't had to pair my MX Master
since the first time I did it, over a year ago.

------
maw
I don't really think that Bluetooth is an industry-wide practical prank that's
gotten totally out of control (you weren't let in on the joke, and I wasn't
either), but I do think that it's nearly indistinguishable from one.

------
vmarshall23
Wait. What? I'm still waiting for reasonable adoption of 4 (re:BLE) ...

------
aphextron
Why hasn't Bluetooth been dumped for audio applications? The bit rate is
atrocious even to a non audiophile, while my 5.8ghz wireless headphones for PC
sound fantastic. Why is this?

------
jmspring
The title is wrong until hardware/software out there supports it. A spec does
release does not mean an immediate vendor adoption.

------
Somasis
Will it still kill my laptop's wifi connection speed if I try to use it?

------
skbohra123
Little too late, bluetooth as a technology is way passed it's hey days.

------
oneplane
Does it finally come in different colo(u)rs now?

