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.
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!
I work in adult toy design/consulting, and radio/antenna design is actually a HUGE problem there. Trying to figure out how to build antennas for mobile-connected wireless adult toys (versus the cheaper < 1ghz radio toys that just come with a remote) that can work in a myriad of situations is a big problem that's delayed some products, killed others. Any glitches on those products usually guarantees online comment/review anger and that it'll never get used again.
I started https://metafetish.com (NSFW, and when I started it was https://slashdong.org) in 2004, as a hobbyist kinda blog about the engineering behind adult toys. Almost 13 years later now and I'm still at it. Things just built up over the years to where my name kinda became synonymous with certain topics. Consulting has always been a smallish side-gig, because the industry is not a great place to make cash, but damn if it ain't constantly weird and interesting.
It's actually a really easy problem to solve with a cord. I have this exact same problem with bluetooth. I have to put my phone in my sweatshirt pocket or in a higher pocket in my backpack or it cuts out.
But thanks for the explanation. This is good to know. I'll plan my walk to and from work through alleys instead of open parks. Because thinking back, it always works in alleys.
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...
If you re-read my comment, you'll note that I only said that 2.4GHZ was in the 1-20 GHz band that is easily absorbed by water.
Engineers juggle multiple constraints, cost, size, power, and efficacy, and 2.4 GHZ choice was the result of the size of the magnetron that would be cost effective and physically fit into the oven. But it did, of course, have to be within the range of frequencies best absorbed by water, which 2.4GHz is, and which is why it's difficult to get bluetooth through your body.
Why don't you look at this link. I think it will prove your understanding is incomplete, and that water does have significant absorption in the microwave region of the spectrum.
The higher data rates are hoped to at least partially compensate for the higher power. You burst data at high power, but for less time. Also, there are retransmits that occur now, if a packet is corrupted. Higher power should result in fewer retransmits, which will help with battery drain. Battery life is hoped to be better, even with the higher power.
There are regulatory limits on how much RF a device can send into the body. These are called SAR limits [1] and they are not changing. I was joking about the body effects. The legal limit is not changing. But devices that used to be further below the limit, will now be closer to it.
I picked up a pair of Bose QC35 a couple of months ago, and for my first pair of BT headphones I'm really impressed.
I use them almost every day on my way to and from work (roughly an hour each way) and I can count the number of interference issues I've had on one hand, and definitely not every 30 seconds.
This is with an iPhone 7 and iPad Pro 9.7".
Second on the Quiet Comforts. I've owned more than a dozen BT headphones over my life and these are the best. Well, best BT implementation at least, I'm not much of an audiophile.
I just got the Jaybird X3s, and paired with an iPhone 7+, haven't had an issue yet. Quite pleasantly surprised, considering all the bluetooth problems I've heard about online. Bluetooth works fine from back pocket, front pocket, coat, inside the house, outside, in the car.
Can confirm, got the Quiet Comforts myself about a month ago and use them every day. Use them with my S7 Edge, Surface Book, cheap 20$ bluetooth dongle connected to my gaming PC and a fat 2012 13" MacBook hand-me-down at work. The only machine I have problems with is the MacBook, to the point where I'd rather just play music from my phone all day than fight with it.
I've had similar experiences with a pair of Sony MDR-XB950BT which i had for about a year and a half. Super happy, actually i can't recall any connection issues, certainly not recurring but i mostly use them in the office and at home, sometimes also outside though.
I have a cheap Bluedio Turbine (€25 on amazon) I've been using for a month without any issues whatsoever, phone in pocket, cycling, rain... plus I haven't charged the battery even once, 3+ weeks of daily usage in. I'd say bluetooth tech is getting quite amazing!
I'll need to test my BT headphones in a busier area then. I have an iPhone7 and $99 JLabs BT headphones and they only ever cut out if I go clear across the gym while my phone is in my bag. I'm going to guess that there just is not a lot of people using wireless in the gym at the times I'm there.
I've got Bose QC35 and Jaybird X2's. I use the jaybirds to workout, Bose for everything else - never had a problem with either one staying connected. Including being across the room from both, with the phone in my pocket. That encompasses a Nexus 6P and a Pixel.
I've only used Jaybirds with my iPhone 5S and 5SE. Didn't even know this was an issue.
I suggest giving them a try. Phone in pocket has never been a problem for me, regardless of where I am at the time. The battery even survives a 4h+ marathon.
On the flip side I've been using my bluetooth headphones every day for over 3 years and I've never had them cut out once, other than if I leave them on from my desk to the kitchen which is about 20 ft and through a few walls.
Bluetooth 5 extends the range and increases the data rate of BLE, but not both at the same time. This will allow you to stream high quality audio over BLE, saving power over regular Bluetooth, but you won't get the range benefit.
Have you considered possible interference and noise introduced by other rival devices competing for the same spectrum?
This has been my hypothesis, considering the disruption patterns I've noticed.
At home, well removed from other possible bluetooth sources, I rarely experience signal cut-out, or choppy reception.
When I move into high traffic areas, the amount of signal loss skyrockets. The worst areas are areas with lots of cars in motion.
My hunch, is that noise, destructive interference, and fortuitous signals result in dropped packets. And cars especially, tend to broadcast stronger signals that outshine an handset/headphone channel, cause both ends of the connection to drop packets.
This is just based on observation. In crowded train stations and near busy roadways my headphones act like shit. I get the feeling it's the old "poorly shielded blender appliance ruins the t.v. reception" business, except the interference drops out in the same way progressive scan HDMI monitors glitch up without shielding.
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.
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.
Bluetooth is complex. Lots of devices have crappy software which gets things wrong. And it doesn't help that the 2.4GHz band is full of radio noise, either. But most of the problems aren't with transmission, they are with setting things up and turning things on and off. Crappy software.
Also, it doesn't help that everything in Bluetooth until BLE (Low Energy) arrived was pretty bad. BLE changed everything and turned Bluetooth around, but BLE doesn't do audio.
There is lots of confusion in the naming, Bluetooth 4.0 incorporated BLE, and later they decided to just call the whole thing Bluetooth, even though it's now a set of two entirely different protocols, not even radio-compatible.
Bluetooth 1.0 uses GFSK at 1 Msym/s, just like BLE / Bluetooth 4.0. So it's the same r/f modulation protocol (it's the higher layers that are incompatible.) Is it the actual GFSK parameters, eg. frequency shifts, that are different?
I know that Bluetooth 2.0 and 3.0 use different r/f modulation (π/4-QPSK and 8DPSK at 1 Msym/s), but why do people say Bluetooth 4.0 is so different when it seems to be the same as Bluetooth 1.0?
One difference is that BLE uses 40 channels in its adaptive frequency hopping scheme, from Wikipedia: "Instead of the Classic Bluetooth 79 1-MHz channels, Bluetooth Smart has 40 2-MHz channels"
Now that I write it out, I see that frequency hopping would count as a "higher layer," but I think it's still managed in hardware, which could be why there are many BLE-only chips.
It's possible the GFSK parameters are also different, and of course the layers above the link manager are vastly different (for some reason).
A major difference is that while original Bluetooth used time-based channel hopping BLE uses sequence-based channel hopping. This means you don't have to keep your local clock or receiver running to know what channel to listen to, rather you listen on a given channel just before you want to speak/receive something and once something shows up there you know where you are in the sequence. BLE-only chips can basically be entirely powered off most of the time without losing connection, whereas bluetooth needs a running clock or a large receive window to stay connected.
In my experience, connecting a device with bluetooth has less than 50% chance of continued success. When it doesn't work it really doesn't work, and there's only so much you can do with most device interfaces. I avoid it whenever possible. Hopefully this new release will change that for future devices.
Yep, I wanted to love Bluetooth for keyboards, but my Logitech and Microsoft wireless keyboards (work and home, respectively) work great with their proprietary receivers (basically like a wireless wire), while the Logitech K810 has random key lag and connectivity issues (try typing your password when Bluetooth doesn't work and you can't log in to re-pair it).
Windows 10 also seems monumentally bad at Bluetooth, and I've tried with a few different Bluetooth dongles with different chipsets. I've had the best luck with the one from Pluggable, which IIRC uses a Cambridge Silicon radio / driver stack. I really wish we had wireless serial instead of wireless USB, as most of the time, that's basically what I want, and stuff like the ESP, nRF24*, or even RFM69 does this quite well. I honestly wish they'd do a 433/900mhz standard for wireless HID only, and another for audio only.
OTOH, I have a Logitech Megaboom which always works amazingly well. Whoever did the Bluetooth radio on that...A+ .
Yeah, watch out with those, because a wireless wire is about accurate security wise too. Typically the proprietary dongles have very little security wise.
I recall when the first Logitech wireless keyboards came out.
Me and a friend were at a regional lan party, and he had one of those keyboard. As we soon learned someone else in the locale also had one, because he would ever so often get random inputs on screen...
The Logitech 810 is a fantastic keyboard however I pretend to ignore the connectivity shortcomings that you describe...
What I would like with the Logitech keyboards and mice is an option to plug in with micro USB or to go Bluetooth, i.e. wired but detachable if your Bluetooth happens to be reliable that day.
There already is a micro USB socket for power on the 810 keyboard, sadly they don't do a mouse that charges on microUSB and can also work on micro USB. Regardless, there is not a lot that really needs to be added on the hardware side to implement such a feature.
If such goodies existed then I would not need that normal keyboard/mouse that I have in my draw for the unpaired situation you describe. I could also do things such as BIOS UEFI settings without having to reach for the emergency input devices.
Despite deficiencies, I find the 810 to be the best keyboard going, I carry mine around instead of a laptop, it works great with work PC, my phone and my home PC.
What use cases do you find Bluetooth keyboard / mice enable? Maybe I'm old fashioned, but I've never been able to come up with a compelling answer for myself.
Most chip manufacturers keep their firmware very close to the chest and from my anecdotal experience, a lot of that firmware is of a low quality; mush a smattering of shoddy chips together and you end up with really weird behavior.
FCC certs of a custom radio used with a bluetooth chip with a binary blob for firmware is the most painful thing I've ever done in my career...I think.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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..
As a user i kinda like the profiles, in particular the OBEX based ones. This because it means i can expect two devices to be able to share files out of the box if both of them have a bluetooth radio. Nothing like that exist for wifi, and i have to set up some client-server scheme to make anything happen.
The OBEX profiles predate even BT, they were inherited from IrDA. IrDA was an earlier method for transferring business cards or similar small files between hand held devices over an infra-red link link.
Not that I disagree with you, but I would love to see examples where it would be the opposite and you would say it was a beautiful and well implemented.
Tends to be hard to implement a specification without any implementation to test it out together with it, but those who do work out, should be looked into why so we all can learn from it.
I think Bluetooth is the worst spec ever. What we need is something that happened to ARMv8, you get a clean room implantation with everything you learned before, and you provide a compatibility layer much like the 32bit ARMv7.
It is a gigantic pile of mess and it never worked well enough for the majority of users.
Talking about design by committees, even the Wifi 802.11 has much improved.
I really wish Apple could design new one and force market adoption with the spec opened.
As long as you're within the communication range and in whatever your protocol calls a "reasonable" environment (e.g. not underwater), you're OK. The strength of the signals isn't chosen at random, it's chosen so that it allows devices to function well (within the design constraints -- range, environment conditions etc.) -- and so that it meets the power consumption constraints imposed by size, design, cost and technology.
tl;dr when someone decided to use a 4 dBm transceiver, they (should have) made a conscious choice about it and would have verified that it's enough.
Quite plainly, if the connection drops when it shouldn't, it's either bad software or bad design.
Bad software is either the Bluetooth stack (especially in legacy Bluetooth devices; newer stacks tend to fare better) or the firmware that talks to the Bluetooth stack (if it's BLE, this is the safer bet).
Bad design on the hardware level is less excusable than it would seem, because a Bluetooth device is not exactly a long-haul wireless link that has to work during the mother of all thunderstorms. There's a wealth of information and modeling tools that help you with this stuff, too. Bad antenna design, bad filtering, bad casing are all common culprits, but I've seen a lot of electronic engineers who wouldn't call themselves RF engineers get it right by just following common sense and doing the math.
Sometimes (but even less often), it's not a design problem, it's a manufacturing problem (e.g. PCB antennas that get damaged or don't get etched right. But this is pretty rare.
Certainly, the operating environment plays a role, but that's why you consider it while you're designing the whole gizmo. You don't (or shouldn't) get to shrug and say hey, it's not my fault we're basically walking cucumbers.
So if a pair of super high-end Bose speakers and a super trendy iPhone keep dropping connection while they're within range, not inside and, respectively, outside a Farady cage or whatever, the reason isn't the black magic that RF design is, it's Bose's and Apple's profit margin.
Edit: I do concur with the other fellow who posted here, Bluetooth really is complex and the band it operates in isn't exactly a charm to work with, but frankly, neither of these reasons account for the huge range of devices that are simply badly designed and/or run bad software. There are a lot of Bluetooth devices that work just fine, a lot of other protocols that operate in the 2.4 GHz band and work just fine, a lot of other protocols that operate in similarly noisy bands and work just fine and a lot of protocols that are more complex and work just fine.
The only thing I've seen work reliably with Bluetooth, ever, is the PlayStation 4 controller. And only when pairing with the PS4 and not a PC. Sony seems to have gone out of their way to add some magical layer to establish and maintain those connections without the end user having to know or see anything about it.
I use the Apple BT keyboard & mouse with a work MacBook Pro, and it was fine. When I added a pair of BT headphones into the mix, it quickly became a mess (audio would drop out when I started typing or moving the mouse). I wonder how much of that is on the headphone manufacturer vs. saturation of BT.
I remember seeing something similar when one or more devices used the serial profile, or related ones (PPP for instance).
When those where in use, it would basically block all other traffic for the duration.
I noticed this back in the day when i really pushed my bluetooth usage.
My setup was a SonyEricsson featurephone, a Nokia N800, some Jabra headphones, and a white box folding keyboard.
As long as i used the "LAN" connection between the N800 and the phone to get online, it all worked fine. But switch it to PPP and the music would stutter whenever there was network activity.
In my experience, Bluetooth audio devices have been the most stable.
SPP (serial port) on the other hand has never worked reliably for me. I mean, I have seen it work. I just never take it as granted that it will work, and thus far have not been disappointed.
Bluetooth drivers in both ios and android never work right. You might get random undocumented error codes on some devices. Some of your connection/transmit functions will just get lost never activating a callback so every single thing needs a timeout handler. I've seen on older androids a callback inexplicably starts getting called twice in a row. I've seen the bluetooth object suddenly is null so you get a hard crash next time something tries to use it. These smartphone drivers fail in every way imaginable and in ways you can't imagine. Be impressed when a bluetooth app works reliably.
It depends, but i can't help suspect that sharing the increasingly saturated 2.4Ghz band (microwave ovens, wifi, who knows what else), and being built around channel hopping (apparently this lead to some issues with US regulators) makes for a fault prone system.
This because while i have had problem on urban streets with a device in my hand and one in my ear, i have observed rurally living relatives that can walk around their whole house with the phone sitting in some corner and not suffering a connection outage.
I have never found it to be an issue and I dont use high end stuff. For example I have a xiaomi redmi note which connetcs to my xiaomi bluetooth speaker or my car system (Nissan) with ease,i dont even think about it. If bluetooth is turned on on my phone it will connect to these without fault and i never get drop outs, same with a bluetooth headset that I sometimes use. I paired with all of them once and now i just turn on bluetooth on my phone and it connects to whatever device i am near.
I have problems with Macbook + JBL xtreme. It's not working. But any other combinations working fine: macbook + any other bluetooth speaker (i have 4 different speakers + headphones) and several mobile phones + JSB xtreme. Just magic.
Complex consumer standard implementations tend to be "buggy", that's how economy works. More robust implementation after "it mostly works" level would give diminishing returns for average consumer product company.
Having to constantly repair my car with my phone and GPS is one of the frustrations of daily life. It's ridiculous - both the car and phone "remember" each other by their list of previously paired devices, yet they don't connect. Only when I repair do they suddenly "find" each other. Crazy.
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.
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), that may not be a net win.
"4x range" means the marketing guys could say anything they wanted. Just like how 4G LTE is multiple Gb per second, 10 times faster than the previous generation! :D
Bluetooth can already do 100 ft... in very good conditions and with the rights devices and drivers.
It's important to note that these improvements only apply to BLE. Classic Bluetooth (EDR) is not changing, at least not significantly.
Also, there will continue to be minor spec revisions (5.1, 5.2, etc). The "Bluetooth 5" terminology is for marketing and PR, to simplify the message. They don't want to confuse the general public with spec revisions.
The press release above has somewhat different numbers: "four times range, two times speed, and eight times broadcast message". For the speed it's just 2x, and the 8x is only about broadcast messages.
> Also, apprently, there's 30.000 companies in the 'Bluetooth Special Interests Group' ?
You need to pay to join the SIG to put the logo on your device (and to advertise support). So the vast majority of those "members" are just people who paid for that.
I've looked and there were no changes to security. PIN entry still trivially leaks the key (even with 'LE Secure Connections'). Out-of-Band is secure but you can't use it because iOS and Android don't let you (except via NFC on Android). Just Works is inherently vulnerable to MitM (it's not really 'broken' but you can't use it if you want high security). Finally Numeric Comparison is apparently secure, but it requires a screen and buttons on both devices which is often not possible, and it's not the nicest user experience.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
Yes! Every intersection in downtown Chicago I have this same issue with my Jabra Revo bluetooth headphones. I'm not sure if it involves the lights switching, but I always get audio cutting out very badly when I'm waiting to cross the street.
And not just traffic lights. I'm in Melbourne, Australia and every day I walk across the concourse above Southern Cross station (major rail switching hub), and at a certain point my BT phones (also Jabra Revo) keep dropping out, then recover as I move past that black spot ("blue spot"?)
Anything emitting in the 2.4 GHz spectrum has the potential to interfere with Bluetooth. Bluetooth is normally pretty robust to that as it channel hops quite fast so unless you are blatting the whole ISM band, you'll just lose a packet here and there which the system copes with fine.
Plenty of traffic light systems in the UK are wireless - saves digging up bits of road, you just need power. I don't know about Germany.
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?
Bluetooth 5 now has enough bandwidth to do uncompressed 16/44.1 stereo PCM in real world situations.
Bluetooth has also optionally supported device-side AAC and MP3 encoding (which Apple now supports, after 10+ years of being in this game, on exactly one chipset: theirs, the W1, via iTunes only, or AAC only).
> which Apple now supports, after 10+ years of being in this game, on exactly one chipset: theirs, the W1, via iTunes only, or AAC only
I remember having rock-solid, fully-featured (volume control, display of song titles etc), well-sounding Sony Ericsson Bluetooth gear back in the featurephone era, but once the iPhone and Android came on the scene, it all regressed with the iPhone not even supporting A2DP for a long time, and when they first added it, the fidelity was atrocious. I can't believe they're still stuck on SBC!
> 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...
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
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
My Apple Pencil has to be repaired sometimes, though I haven't figured out what triggers it. Since all that means is plugging it into the iPad's lightning port for about a second, I haven't cared enough to look into it.
Much less annoying than headphones/earbuds where the process is something like 1) Turn off earbuds. 2) Turn on earbuds. 3) Keep holding the power button for another 5 seconds to go into pairing mode. 4) Open settings app, go to bluetooth page, reconnect to device
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.
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.
Sure, if I can get the damn things to pair. But if my phone has paired to something else, or my wife has paired her phone to the car again, then it's ALL BETS OFF!!!
Don't get me started on this: "or my wife has paired her phone to the car again"
Why is it that with my car, while it presumably supports having like 8 phones paired to it, I have to re-pair everytime someone else pairs?
If I'm in the car, but my wife isn't use my phone. If my wife is in the car, but I'm not use hers. If we're both in the car, pick one phone (I don't really care how). How hard is that? Rather it just seems to want to pair to whoever paired last even if that phone isn't around anymore.
It's not really all bluetooth what you're describing there. Almost all of it is implementation-specific: many vendors do a sad job at implementing bluetooth, or if they buy a module as-is, they do a bad job at integrating that module.
Even if the SIG would pay implementors to do it right, it would be done wrong. Some vendors just don't care. Same goes for USB3 cables for example. It's not that hard to do it right, but many just don't care or don't want to.
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.
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?
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.