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Comment by selfhoster11 | Hacker News Reader

> Bluetooth reminds me a lot of the F-35: Designed to do everything, does none of it particularly well, hard to build/maintain, and frankly would have been better off as three or four competing standards that did their "thing" well and nothing else.

Hard disagree. Bluetooth has an important disadvantage, in that its quality is bad. But it's also got an important advantage: it works, at all.

Basically anything made from early 00s onwards will be able to connect to a modern pair of Bluetooth headphones. Interop is the selling feature.

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That's true of 'classic' bluetooth, but not of LE. LE is legitimately good. Source: Implemented a couple of LE devices. There's no shared heritage between LE and Classic, just the branding in common.

What are the bandwidth and range for LE in practice?

2Mbits PHY as of 5.0, which in reality means ~175kB/sec across uplink and downlink - maximum. Range is very good, 100-300 feet in open conditions.

Interesting.

I wonder if there's any way for them to increase the bandwidth 10x or so. It would increase the use cases a ton.

I think we call it WiFi ;) but yes I agree, I expect to see incremental bandwidth improvements moving forward.

I don't think there are many devices that can create ad-hoc connections between them using WiFI. Maybe they should, but are there many devices that can do this?

I.e. I connect my Windows laptop to my Android phone directly through WiFI, in a very simple manner.

btw I hope I didn’t come across snarky. I agree BLE would be better with more bandwidth, I think part of the reason Bluetooth is the F-35 of protocols is it tried to be everything to everyone and it’s a hard line to draw. IMO audio should be in the BLE camp but beyond audio I think wifi is a better fit. JMHO.

Oh yes, LE is a completely different can of worms (and a horrible one at that). I was referring to classic Bluetooth, since most LE headsets also support it as a connectivity mode.

> Basically anything made from early 00s onwards will be able to connect to a modern pair of Bluetooth headphones. Interop is the selling feature.

In theory, sure. But in practice? Not in my experience.

> Basically anything made from early 00s onwards will be able to connect to a modern pair of Bluetooth headphones. Interop is the selling feature.

Yeah, it can probably connect, but will it stay connected and will it reconnect without repairing later? Often not.

I’m mainly using Sony and Jabra gears with iPhone, when I turn them on they reconnect, no issues, except some headsets tend to cut off when the virtual line defined by phone and headset runs below surface of my torso for more than couple inches long.

But it doesn’t. Switch doesn’t support it. PS4 doesn’t support it.

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