The fifth generation of the Bluetooth standard will be released in late 2016/early 2017 – bringing increased range, speed and messaging capacity. The Bluetooth Special Interest Group (SIG) says that Bluetooth 5.0 will be especially well-suited to whole-home IoT applications.
Range will be four times higher than Bluetooth 4.0 LE (around 365m), while speed will be twice as high. At the same time, the capacity of data broadcasts will be eight times greater. The Bluetooth SIG says that this will enable a move away from the paired device model and towards a connectionless IoT system.
