The Bluetooth SIG has released details of Bluetooth 5, which is claimed to have eight times the capacity, twice the speed and four times the range of Bluetooth 4.2.
Bandwidth goes up to 2 Mbps and range is described as ‘the whole home’, although in some circumstances it can reach more than a kilometre, so it might be useful, for example, in sports venues and stadiums. The range extension has been achieved without boosting power consumption, the SIG said.
The message capacity has been increased to be more efficient at distributing data over all data channels to improve applications such as beacons. The new version continues to support low energy features and can be downloaded here.
The group expects audio to be more important as it claims that the power consumption is less than previous versions when streaming audio.
Devices using the new specification are expected to arrive in the first half of 2017.
Analyst Comment
The SIG believes that homes could have more than fifty internet connected devices by 2020 and that may be too much for Wi-Fi to handle, so it sees a good opportunity. (BR)
