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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
> 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.
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.
[+] [-] BinaryIdiot|9 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] Analemma_|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kraftman|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lasryaric|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jwr|9 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] brickmort|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Ixiaus|9 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] thearn4|9 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] nsxwolf|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] csours|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fest|9 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] robotjosh|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] digi_owl|9 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] celticninja|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] c54|9 years ago|reply
Bluetooth frequencies are absorbed by water (and your body is water)
[+] [-] vadimbaryshev|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Yaggo|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] smegel|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] neals|9 years ago|reply
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|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gt565k|9 years ago|reply
Although, obstacle/wall penetration is probably still fairly poor.
The range is really the limiting factor in IoT uses IMO...
[+] [-] pogo|9 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] krasin|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gumby|9 years ago|reply
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.
Same applies to USB and HDMI.
[+] [-] IshKebab|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gerardnll|9 years ago|reply
2x Speed 4x Range 8x Data
https://www.bluetooth.com/specifications/bluetooth-core-spec...
[+] [-] Twirrim|9 years ago|reply
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://pomcor.com/2015/06/03/has-bluetooth-become-secure/
[+] [-] IshKebab|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lucb1e|9 years ago|reply
[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.
[+] [-] FrenchyJiby|9 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] drey08|9 years ago|reply
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|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] servercobra|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rkangel|9 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] mrpippy|9 years ago|reply
https://www.nordicsemi.com/eng/Products/nRF52840
[+] [-] Sephr|9 years ago|reply
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|9 years ago|reply
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AptX
[+] [-] DiabloD3|9 years ago|reply
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).
[+] [-] legulere|9 years ago|reply
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
- it takes less power than wifi
[+] [-] wyager|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lowglow|9 years ago|reply
> 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?
[+] [-] btreecat|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] drak0n1c|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] matt_wulfeck|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] y04nn|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sandworm101|9 years ago|reply
And KSP just updated too.
[+] [-] pksadiq|9 years ago|reply
Does anybody know the power usage (idle, advertising, data transferring, etc.) of BT 5 compared to BT 4.x LE?
Thanks
[+] [-] csours|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] johnhenry|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sliken|9 years ago|reply