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Comment by modeless | Hacker News Reader

I don't need more range or more speed. I need it to reliably connect and stay connected while devices are well within range of each other, and stop breaking every time I upgrade anything. Unfortunately that would require making it less complex, which is about as likely as a broken egg spontaneously reassembling.

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As a matter of fact "more range" is quite the opposite of what I want from Bluetooth. Do I really need to have 5000 keyboards within range of my computer at the office, instead of the 100 I already have? I definitely do not.

Headphones are the big benefactor here, for me at least. I can walk to the kitchen with my wireless headphones.

I've found that microwave interferes very strongly with Bluetooth headphones

And bodies. Had to move my laptop dock to the other side of my desk when I switched headphones from a pair that had the transmitter in the left ear to the right.

Sacks of water will do that :)

Wet dogs can play havoc with wireless.

Yeah that is perhaps the most problematic aspect of Bluetooth. The radio interface is designed with the presumption of the signal bouncing off nearby surfaces. Thus it is sensitive to line of sight issues.

Mind you, i have also been able to connect to a USB dongle through solid wood walls, so mileage may vary.

Never mind that you can get two classes of radios, on top of the LE stuff. With each class having different transmission strengths.

Bluetooth is using the very same microwaves (much like wifi), so yes.

Both use the 2.4 ghz spectrum, so that makes sense - especially for bad microwaves. I had an old microwave that completely tanked my 2.4 ghz Wifi back in the days (very poorly shielded).

I still do. The ability to stream music in my kitchen is the reason I bought a 5GHz router.

Agree, I look forward to the day I can leave my iPhone in a gym locker and work out with just headphones

Would you be able to pause or control songs though?

Sure, bluetooth had media controls for ages. I have a bluetooth waterproof speaker that I just take with me in the shower - and I leave my phone outside of the bathroom so it doesn't get wet. I can change songs and pause with buttons on the speaker, with the phone safely on the other side of the wall.

Aren't they often made out of metal and act like a faraday cage thus?

Typically, but not always. I've belonged to gyms that have had a metal mesh (along the lines of a stiffer chain-link fence), flat metal (like a high school locker), and wood cabinets for their lockers.

I'd highly recommend getting a tiny mp3 player (say Clip Zip, though they are now discontinued...) and a short light headphone cable. Why send audio wirelessly when the tech to play it is as small as the receiver?

There are also headphones with built in players, I don't know how the quality of those is though.

Why send audio wirelessly when the tech to play it is as small as the receiver?

Because you might want to stream audio from the Internet, or you don't want to waste time converting newer audio formats to MP3 and then copying them over, or you'd rather not have cables around you when you work out, or you might want to track what you've listen (particularly useful for audiobooks and long podcasts), etc.

Yes, these are not indispensable life necessities nor anything like that, but given the choice, I'd rather beam the audio from my tablet than carry an extra player.

So you'd be happy with a Chromecast Audio receiver built into a set of headphones?

Bluetooth headphones tend to have device volume control, play, pause, and skip. Many also have microphones and also allow to to take and make calls.

Because it's impossible to stream music, podcasts and take calls ?

If you take calls at the gym then you are doing it wrong.

Pretty much all the decent dedicated MP3 players have been discontinued. The last really great one for me was the Samsung's range (nee Yepp). But unfortunately the last one was the YP-U7 back in 2012 and it's very obvious they aren't going to make any more, even though they never announced it.

Sony still does players but they're not very good.

Care to elaborate on that? I find the Sony players deliver what they promise, especially the NW-A20 series.

You can still get iPods in all sizes and colors. They're pretty decent.

Because cables get caught on things, tangled up, and are just generally annoying to deal with on your person.

I hate wires with a passion. I don't what's wrong with me but I manage to tie, bust, wrap, tangle them in every most ridiculous possible wrong way all the time. I'm always sniping for multipairing mp3 capable headphones.

If your gym has metal lockers I don't think it will happen any time soon.

The problem though is the Sun will negatively affect Bluetooth range. If you're inside it's great and you can go into multiple rooms depending on the materials / wall thickness between you and the device. Once you go outside on a sunny day if the phone isn't directly in the line-of-sight (and even then) you'll get constant disconnects. Using multiple headsets / headphones and phones (including iPhone and multiple Androids) and I have yet to have one that DIDN'T do this.

More range may help thing. Well I can hope anyway.

The Sun affects the range? How and why, that doesn't make sense at all?

> How and why, that doesn't make sense at all?

Not sure. I remember reading an article some time ago that stated the Sun's electromagnetic radiation could interfere with Bluetooth and it's always worked with my observations. I've used multiple Plantronics headsets, Motorola headphones and an off brand of headphones all with an iPhone 5S, iPhone 6+, Nexus 6P, Moto X and a Note 3 and in all of these devices they work great indoors and going outside on a sunny day it would break up (but cloudy always seemed to work better).

It's entirely possible this is some crazy bullshit but my observations are real. So if it ends up being that the Sun does NOT provide interfere then it must be SOMETHING. I just had this issue this past week when I was working outside and had to grab my wired headphones.

Another, as likely, aspect, is that Bluetooth is designed around signals bouncing off surfaces. Try moving your phone from one side of the body to the other while outside. It may well be that your surroundings do not provide enough signal reflection. Keep in mind that most mobile bluetooth radios do not transmit with the same strength as wifi. Best i can tell, only USB dongles use a wifi equivalent radio class.

Interesting and sounds reasonable. I wonder if Bluetooth 5 will help in this regard.

I guess it could be possible. But the thing about range is that is most often reported under ideal conditions. Meaning clear line of sight between antennas and little to no other transmissions in that frequency range.

And likely your best results will be if both devices are v5 devices.

The Sun is quite a noisy radio transmitter across a very wide range of frequencies. Downside of having a big, hot unshielded fusion reactor in the sky.

Sun affects bluetooth? How?

The only times I've trouble with BT outside is when tons of people or shops are nearby (overcrowded 2.4 ghz spectrum I assume - bt, wifi, etc)

>Once you go outside on a sunny day if the phone isn't directly in the line-of-sight (and even then) you'll get constant disconnects. Using multiple headsets / headphones and phones (including iPhone and multiple Androids) and I have yet to have one that DIDN'T do this.

Well, I've used wireless keyboards (Apple compact) and wireless headphones (Parrot Zik 2.0), and had zero disconnects under the hottest of Suns in several different countries.

What do you mean "line of sight"? How far were you? Was it behind some wall or something? With the iPad/phone on my pocket/bag I never had any issue.

> What do you mean "line of sight"? How far were you? Was it behind some wall or something? With the iPad/phone on my pocket/bag I never had any issue.

Basically if the BT hardware itself was on the right side of my head then my phone had to be in my right pocket or I'd get semi frequent disconnects outside. So not really line-of-sight in visual spectrum terms but I have had so many observations with so many bluetooth headsets and headphones and different phones that I always believed the original article I read a long time ago about sun interference (which, of course, I can't find today).

It could certainly be something else but I most certainly have reproducible issues with using bluetooth outside versus inside my house or even car.

Could be that it's not the sun being the problem, but not having walls. Inside, the radio waves can bounce of the walls, around your body. Outside, they have to go through your body.

Seems reasonable and would certainly explain my issues. I wonder if Bluetooth 5 will help that in any way.

No, shouldn't be related at all (with the Sun, as I've gotten fine connection in the sun, whether the side etc).

Sounds like it's more about some flimsy and/or underpowered BT headsets.

I have never had an issue in the sun with my phone in my pocket. Is that considered LOS?

I need the range. I routinely grab my phone when I'm cooking dinner and walk to the living room causing my bluetooth speaker to make awful noises.

Is the bluetooth spec the limit though, or maybe the implementation? I can leave my phone on the table downstairs and my headphones still work fine in the attic, which is through 2 floors of reinforced concrete. I was very surprised to be able to do this, but kitchen-living room should be possible. Unless your kitchen is in the west wing, and your living room is a mile down the hall in the east wing in which case I'm envious of your living arrangement and understand the need for more range in the spec. ;)

As it's 2.4ghz it may also be partially spectrum pollution.

That said - that seems rather impressive for Bluetooth, I've had one reinforced concrete wall pretty consistently screw up most bluetooth signals in my experience, so I'd posit that you're getting unusually good reception there.

I wonder what strength the radios broadcast on. I do have a 2.4GHz wifi-router both downstairs and in the attic so you would expect no signal at all, given the situation. I'll admit that by this point it's extremely sensitive to spectrum pollution; a nearby laptop with wifi on will mess with it enough that it starts stuttering. My only issue with bluetooth is with Android; it semi-randomly likes to change pitch and speed by a little [1]. Very noticeable if you listen to electronic music. Had it with my previous phone (Android M, CM) and now with my current phone (also Android M, stock) and different devices (headphones, car).

[1]https://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=209473

Yeah, anecdotal but every friend of mine that complains about BT does it in relation to their Android devices.

I've heard a couple of complaints about Macs but they're rare.

Seems the Android BT stack is just more... flaky. I wonder why...

Android 1.0 to 4.3 (iirc) used Bluez, an open source implementation related to Linux.

Come 4.4 Google partnered up with qualcomm (again iirc) to write a new stack from scratch.

Iirc, there are multiple classes of bluetooth radio. And only one of them, that i have most often seen in the form of USB dongles, are wifi equivalent.

That's where a wifi speaker is good.

I am able to leave my phone in my office in the basement and walk upstairs to get a cup of coffee and stay on the call with my bluetooth headphones.

Then again, if I'm biking and my phone is in my right pocket and I turn my head to the left, the audio skips. So I don't know if I can blame than on range, but there's something odd going on there.

The frequency range used, 2.4Ghz, is absorbed/blocked by water (rain, fog, leaves, wet dogs, human bodies, etc). Most mobile devices use a fairly weak transmitter both to save battery and because the distance between devices is expected to be short. On top of that, when indoors the signal may be bouncing off walls or other surfaces.

I'm currently wearing a heart monitoring device that communicates over Bluetooth and would greatly benefit from greater range. Which is to say, there's certainly a market for folks needing greater range.

What something like a heart monitor would need above anything else is reliability.

A monitor is not a life critical device, unless another critical device depends on the monitor's telemetry. Bluetooth is perfectly adequate in this case.

The range increase is for distributed industrial network architectures, such as smart grids/cities. Bluetooth LE is aimed at long range, low power devices that are checking in with telemetry-type data every so often rather than pairing your phone and your keyboard to your computer.

...which is what Zigbee should be addressing.

Phone manufacturers universally adopted Bluetooth as the standard wireless protocol for peripheral devices.

Zigbee and other 802.15.4 protocols will always be at a disadvantage even for tasks the Bluetooth protocol is not suited for. Bluetooth chips are cheap and more widely supported than anything else because Bluetooth radios are manufactured at massive scale for the phone market.

The original poster was talking about scenarios with industrial devices and NOT for pairing with phones...

Bluetooth is already there, and if the same chip can be used in a phone or a button cell powered telemetry sensor, economies of scale kicks in.

And BTLE is specifically designed to work without the pairing dance.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bluetooth_low_energy

> Bluetooth is already there, and if the same chip can be used in a phone or a button cell powered telemetry sensor, economies of scale

Actually, for industrial applications, it's more likely to be Zigbee that is already there, and the economies of scale will favour it over BTLE (particularly when you consider Zigbee allows thousands of devices in a network, while BTLE can't even get to double digits). There's a ton of other advantages to Zigbee for industrial applications (not the least of which is resiliency).

Maybe you want a bluetooth bridge (though WiFi is probably very tempting for that purpose), but bluetooth is bad enough at doing its own job, let alone something else.

The main reason they are even increasing the range is for advertisers' rather than users' sake. They want advertisers to be able to "push" ads to people at a longer range.

Depends on your goal :) if you want to listen in on 5000 different keyboards, then the range extension is quite welcome.

Though personally i don't either.

Yup. Bluetooth is kind of a nightmare for operability. I do think it could benefit from a bit more speed, in terms of opening up what it can do, but in terms of range.... if I need range, I'll use WiFi. What I need is for bluetooth to just work, dammit. I get that it is hard, but work on that before you work on anything else. Heck, I've found that using WiFi instead of bluetooth for a wireless hotspot/link is more reliable. How is that possible?

It's aimed at low power IoT devices. Wi-Fi is (relatively) very power hungry compared with Bluetooth LE.

Power helps with signal quality and bandwidth maybe, but simplicity and interoperability are all but completely orthogonal concerns.

I have a Nexus 6p, which I connect to my car via Bluetooth for music and navigation.

The dropped audio, stutters, and need to reconnect are driving me crazy. I've now switched back to a generic audio cable.

Bluetooth reliability really is dire, the phone is within 10m of wherever the car transceiver is and in the designed hotspot too (inside the car) and it still fails.

That problem seems to be specific to Android. I had Samsung ATIV S, which did not have this problem at all (Win Phone). However both S3 and Nexus 6 have it. The later I bought in part to make it go away at least partially:(

Indeed, they made a mess of it twice - right around when BlueZ finally got good, they switched to a different stack on Android 4.2 and broke everything again.

Remind me, was that before or after bluez introduced a pulseaudio dependency?

It was before BlueZ 5.0 was released. Not that it matters because BlueZ on Android doesn't use PulseAudio.

I've got a cheap little Bluetooth kit for my car and mount it right next to my nexus 6p mount. I very rarely, if ever, have issues.

> Unfortunately that would require making it less complex, which is about as likely as a broken egg spontaneously reassembling.

This is such a great analogy on so many levels. The natural tendency of software projects to exhibit the effects of entropy.

Best i can tell, its because humans prefer adding stuff to maintaining stuff. So things end up sprawling over time...

I was thinking about this not long ago. People also prefer buying 'more' rather than 'less but less tech debt, and more solid old'. Nature at work.

It seems likely that "more range" also translates to "more robust at existing ranges" (but I have no facts to back that up)

This is what I need. Phone in pocket and Bluetooth headset on neck results in buffer dropouts when I'm mid stride. I have to hold my phone in my hand to get stable playback. And I'm using Bluetooth 4.

I'm imagining a stride which significantly changes transmitter-receiver distance or gets big body parts in the way. The Ministry of Silly Walks has a rival.

I'd also like it to consume less power. I know the current standard touts itself as "low-energy" but I can see a very noticeable increase in battery drain when I have it enabled on my phone. So I always keep it disabled.

This is really a poor marketing job by the Bluetooth SIG. Bluetooth 4.0 added BLE, the low energy mode, but it didn't change anything about the power usage of existing modes.

BLE is almost and entirely different protocol, albeit implemented on the same chipset, which is running alongside the existing Bluetooth stack on your phone. Nothing in the Bluetooth 4.0 spec reduces the power usage of the Basic Rate and Enhanced Data Rate modes.

Seems similar to the mess that is USB 3.1.

One would be lead to believe that 3.1 and the C plug is one and the same, But they are not.

There are actually 3 different specs that the OEMs can combine in various ways.

First is the C plug spec, that can be used with or without the Power Delivery and 3.1 data spec.

Then there is the 3.1 data spec, that is so minor an update to the 3.0 spec that effectively all 3.0 devices are 3.1 compatible. It can be used with A and C plugs alike.

Then there is the Power Delivery spec. This promises that you can get up to 20V out of a USB port, any USB port. Yep, you can encounter A ports that can go up to 20V if you have the right device and cable at the other end.

I never understood why Bluetooth and NFC still aren't best friends. Pairing should be as simple as tapping.

I do have a bluetooth receiver with NFC. It's great!

> I don't need more range ... I need it to reliably connect and stay connected while devices are well within range

You might need more range.

I have connectivity problems (short drop-outs) with a little BT receiver I use with the bone-conduction headphones (not BT themselves) I use when running if I have the receiver clipped to my shorts on the side opposite the arm I have the phone arm-band on but not if it is clipped to the other side or higher up.

The problem presumably is that the 10m range is an "up to" figure achieved in ideal conditions and having my body between the two devices is not ideal conditions.

Of course if the interference is of the "no signal at all is going to get through the noise floor" variety then increasing the range (presumably by increasing power output?) isn't going to help.

I'd just like to have paired devices actually automatically reconnect without having to unpair and repair.

The only things that seems to do this reliably are PS4 controllers with my PC.

Thankfully my '08 car does this, but my fathers £400 pilot headsets won't stay paired with anything.

It can be done with BT - the $15 headphones I buy from random Chinese sellers work fine every time. The implementations seem to be at fault, not the protocol.

I'd say the protocol is at fault if it's difficult to implement.

The physical world always has implementation difficulties. It is a messy, noisy, uncontrolled place. On top of that, many implementers will avoid going full-ass when half-ass will do. No protocol will ever fix these issues.

Speed, who cares. I need better latency.

At least Bluetooth mice/trackpads need better response time.

For example Magic Trackpad 2 is so horrible to use compared to Macbook built in trackpad because of bluetooth latency.

It's also jarring for audio and it doesn't help that they also use latency-inducing SBC.

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