Bluetooth 5.0: Redefining the Way We Transmit Information

The latest development in Bluetooth technology is nothing short of bold. The new system is going to redefine the way Bluetooth transmits information, moving away from the traditional device-to-device connection model and embracing a more broadcast-based approach. This means that devices can now send out messages without needing to establish a direct connection with another device. Instead, these messages can be broadcasted into the air, allowing other devices within range to receive them.

This new system has several potential applications. For instance, imagine having a Bluetooth device that broadcasts out a message such as "device locator". In this scenario, if you have a phone and the device locator is broadcasting its location, your phone would not need to connect directly to it in order to figure out how close you are to the device. The strength of the signal would be enough to provide an estimate of the distance.

Another example is the use of beacon functions, which are devices that simply broadcast out messages without expecting any response. If a device supports or has these beacon things enabled, when you walk by it within a certain range, it will do something - perhaps send a push notification to your phone or provide location tracking. For instance, you could have beacon devices around your house and use an indoor GPS system that triangulates based on the strength of different beacons to pinpoint exactly where devices are in your house.

This technology has the potential to make many tasks easier and more convenient. Imagine being able to track down a lost item without having to walk around with a metal detector or relying on verbal descriptions from others. The ability to triangulate location would provide a highly accurate estimate of where an object is, making it much simpler to find.

However, there are also concerns about the potential misuse of this technology. Specifically, advertisers and retailers are already exploring ways to use Bluetooth beacons to send targeted advertisements to consumers in public spaces. This could become annoying for those who do not want to receive such messages, and it remains to be seen how settings will be implemented to mitigate this issue.

Despite these concerns, the potential benefits of Bluetooth 5.0's new broadcast-based approach seem to outweigh the drawbacks. One major advantage is that it would enable devices to communicate with each other without needing to rely on a central Wi-Fi hub. This would make it possible for smart devices to connect directly with one another, creating a mesh network-like system.

This idea of using Bluetooth as a whole protocol for inside-the-home communication is an exciting development. It could provide an alternative to traditional Wi-Fi-based systems and offer greater flexibility and convenience in terms of device connectivity. Imagine being able to place a weather station near you and have it broadcast its location and conditions to anyone within range, or having devices communicate with one another seamlessly without needing to connect through a central hub.

The technical specifications for Bluetooth 5.0 are impressive, with double the bandwidth, four times the range, and eight times the message capacity compared to previous versions. These enhancements make this new version of the technology even more promising, particularly when it comes to implementing these broadcast-based applications.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enhey what's up guys I'm Theo Joe and today's video is gonna talk about Bluetooth five you may have heard about it especially in the most recent phones like the galaxy s 8 the note 8 and of course the most recent iPhone 8 and you might be wondering what are the differences between Bluetooth 5 and the previous versions because there are a lot of big big improvements and it should be pretty exciting even if you don't really know much about bluetooth but we're gonna go over that now quickly Before we jump in I want to remind you guys if you're subscribed and you actually want to see my new videos be sure to enable notifications or else the YouTube algorithm literally might not even show you new videos at all it's it's pretty bad so be sure to do that and also I just want to give a quick shout out to my social media sites if you want to follow me on Instagram Twitter all that is in the description so with that out of the way we can get back to you Bluetooth 5 which is the successor to the previous 4.2 Bluetooth and you may have noticed right off the bat probably not Bluetooth 5 doesn't have the point X number notation it's now just Bluetooth 5 instead of 5.0 they dropped all that to make it easier to understand which kind of makes sense because before was 4.0 4.1 4.2 most people probably had no idea what the heck the difference was so should be easier to follow from now on of course we probably care more about the exciting stuff like the technical aspects first of all Bluetooth 5 is gonna have twice the bandwidth of the regular 4.2 that you might be used to so before it was only one megabit bandwidth and that was in ideal situations now it's 2 megabits still not a lot you'd expect it to be more especially since Wi-Fi as well we have gigabit Wi-Fi now and bluetooth is only 2 megabits but whatever it's a different protocol different purposes we can take what improvements we get also in addition to that it's gonna have larger data packets which just means there's gonna have to be fewer transmissions hopefully that just means faster connections again but not only has the bandwidth increased also the range Bluetooth 5 has four times the range as 4.2 and so that's going to be about 30 to 50 meters and not even line-of-sight if there's no obstructions at all then it could be hundreds of meters potentially so this is obviously a big deal now you won't have to worry about losing connections hopefully if you're moving throughout the whole house even and that is with the same power requirements it's all Low Energy although of course if you're going to get the super extended range you're gonna lose some of that bandwidth some of that speed but if it's something that is just transmitting basic data and not necessarily music or something like that then it's gonna be able to go a lot further even if it's less data you still get that range which is probably more important one of the main reasons Bluetooth 5 has that much improved range is because it has better interference handling so you may not know that bluetooth uses basically the same spectrum as everything else 2.4 gigahertz so it's pretty crowded with all the routers and so many other devices but this time it uses a few different techniques to make sure it uses the least interfere channel so it can select from different bands and say ok well this part of the spectrum is not as crowded right now and it will transmit using that as opposed to a more crowded Channel and just sticking with that all the time a lot of routers do this with audio channel selection and this is a little bit different than Wi-Fi channels so maybe it'll use bands in between the Wi-Fi channels overall it's just gonna be better range also it's going to use a technique called forward error correction FEC which is a type of error correction that deals with interference in wireless signals and the idea is it just uses redundancy so perhaps if it sends a little bit of signal and it's a little bit corrupted something else will come along with it that will be able to repair that signal on the other end maybe without having to have that other device send a signal back say oh can you resend that because it didn't work it will just not have to do that anymore so I'm not super familiar with the technique I think that might be a basic understanding based on parity of even files there's parity files that can replace err even if you don't have the original same idea I think here now I think one of the most exciting changes though is Bluetooth five now has eight times the capacity for broadcast messages you might think what the heck is that but it's actually kind of interesting there's some good things about this and bad things let me explain broadcast message is kind of like it suggests is a message that is sent out by a Bluetooth device that is connectionless it's not meant to necessarily connect directly between devices it's just kind of like a message that's broadcasted out and this is gonna have more capacity so for example when you go to look at a list of Bluetooth devices that your device might want to connect to you notice how it has very basic information like the name of the device the MAC address and that's it but it doesn't really tell you much about it now it should be able to tell you a lot more information about that device because the outgoing only signal can carry more information so maybe it'll say the name of the device the version the range even how far it is away stuff like that and interestingly Bluetooth itself said that Bluetooth 5.0 is going to redefine the way Bluetooth transmits information that's bold words but basically they're going to be moving away from a system of just purely connecting device to device with Bluetooth and instead move more towards those kind of broadcast messages where you don't necessarily need to connect directly to a device to use it and keep that connection but rather it can actually use other types of information that is just broadcast only from the Bluetooth device now you might be thinking Ari what the heck does that all mean what's the practical implication here well so think of it this way some example might be if you have a Bluetooth device that is only gonna really be broadcasting out words such as maybe a device locator so previously if you had a device locator that would connect to your phone and then that connection based on the strength of the signal would tell you how close you are to a device well now you might not even need to connect directly to that device it would just broadcast out and you could figure out where that thing is based on the signal that it's sending out without having to send anything back another very interesting purpose is so called beacon functions which I think are very interesting but also a double-edged sword so the idea with this is you have a beacon device which just kind of sits there it's broadcasting out with these broadcast messages doesn't expect to have anything connect to it but its proximity based so if you have a device that supports or has these beacon things enabled then when you walk by it within a certain range then it will do something maybe it'll send a push notification to your phone or also again we talk about location tracking you could have these beacon devices around your house and you could have a indoor GPS type thing so based on the strength of these different beacons you could literally pinpoint where devices are in your house so if you lose something it's not like walking around with a metal detector or something saying all the signals stronger here we're getting hot and cold it literally will tell you all right this is where it is so it can triangulate that would be just one use but the other thing which I'm kind of worried about is advertisements and they specifically mention advertisements in the specifications for Bluetooth and kind of the uses that might be for advertisers where say you're in a store and you're walking by a shelf of some product and they put a beacon there where you walk by and it sends a notification to your phone hey buy this thing on sale so I could see how that could get really annoying hopefully there will be settings that will be able to mitigate that you can disable it and it'll be a specific type of message that will distinguish between something that you set up and something a store just randomly put up so you could filter them out I don't know how that's going to work but either way I do think this broadcast message idea is a good idea and the good will probably outweigh the bad and based on all this it kind of makes sense that Bluetooth has said that they're wanting to focus a lot on IOT Internet of Things so bluetooth can now be used more between smart devices instead of just your phone and the device one-to-one so I guess the idea here is now to kind of use Bluetooth more as a whole protocol like a mesh network almost for inside your home that would be like an alternative to Wi-Fi because as you know right now if you want to connect smart devices usually you have to connect them all to the same Wi-Fi point and they talk to each other that way maybe with this you won't have to do that you won't rely on a Wi-Fi signal it can just be directly between the devices but it doesn't have to only connect between those devices if that makes sense so I don't know about you but I think even with those basic examples it sounds pretty cool I think there's a lot of potential here for different devices new types of devices we haven't even thought of that would be able to utilize this new type of connection I don't know like a weather station maybe you put it near you put it outside and now you have a portable weather station that broadcasts to anyone nearby you once the weather or something like that I don't know so yeah there's not much more to say about it bluetooth five pretty much improves in every way you got that double bandwidth four times the range eight times the message capacity it's great so let me know what you think down in the comment section if you want to keep watching I'll put some other videos right here you can click on should find those pretty interesting and again if you want to subscribe be sure to do that and make a few videos a week and also enable notifications if you really want again my social media accounts will be in the description if you want to follow me other places and besides that though guys thanks so much for watching I'll see you next time have a good onehey what's up guys I'm Theo Joe and today's video is gonna talk about Bluetooth five you may have heard about it especially in the most recent phones like the galaxy s 8 the note 8 and of course the most recent iPhone 8 and you might be wondering what are the differences between Bluetooth 5 and the previous versions because there are a lot of big big improvements and it should be pretty exciting even if you don't really know much about bluetooth but we're gonna go over that now quickly Before we jump in I want to remind you guys if you're subscribed and you actually want to see my new videos be sure to enable notifications or else the YouTube algorithm literally might not even show you new videos at all it's it's pretty bad so be sure to do that and also I just want to give a quick shout out to my social media sites if you want to follow me on Instagram Twitter all that is in the description so with that out of the way we can get back to you Bluetooth 5 which is the successor to the previous 4.2 Bluetooth and you may have noticed right off the bat probably not Bluetooth 5 doesn't have the point X number notation it's now just Bluetooth 5 instead of 5.0 they dropped all that to make it easier to understand which kind of makes sense because before was 4.0 4.1 4.2 most people probably had no idea what the heck the difference was so should be easier to follow from now on of course we probably care more about the exciting stuff like the technical aspects first of all Bluetooth 5 is gonna have twice the bandwidth of the regular 4.2 that you might be used to so before it was only one megabit bandwidth and that was in ideal situations now it's 2 megabits still not a lot you'd expect it to be more especially since Wi-Fi as well we have gigabit Wi-Fi now and bluetooth is only 2 megabits but whatever it's a different protocol different purposes we can take what improvements we get also in addition to that it's gonna have larger data packets which just means there's gonna have to be fewer transmissions hopefully that just means faster connections again but not only has the bandwidth increased also the range Bluetooth 5 has four times the range as 4.2 and so that's going to be about 30 to 50 meters and not even line-of-sight if there's no obstructions at all then it could be hundreds of meters potentially so this is obviously a big deal now you won't have to worry about losing connections hopefully if you're moving throughout the whole house even and that is with the same power requirements it's all Low Energy although of course if you're going to get the super extended range you're gonna lose some of that bandwidth some of that speed but if it's something that is just transmitting basic data and not necessarily music or something like that then it's gonna be able to go a lot further even if it's less data you still get that range which is probably more important one of the main reasons Bluetooth 5 has that much improved range is because it has better interference handling so you may not know that bluetooth uses basically the same spectrum as everything else 2.4 gigahertz so it's pretty crowded with all the routers and so many other devices but this time it uses a few different techniques to make sure it uses the least interfere channel so it can select from different bands and say ok well this part of the spectrum is not as crowded right now and it will transmit using that as opposed to a more crowded Channel and just sticking with that all the time a lot of routers do this with audio channel selection and this is a little bit different than Wi-Fi channels so maybe it'll use bands in between the Wi-Fi channels overall it's just gonna be better range also it's going to use a technique called forward error correction FEC which is a type of error correction that deals with interference in wireless signals and the idea is it just uses redundancy so perhaps if it sends a little bit of signal and it's a little bit corrupted something else will come along with it that will be able to repair that signal on the other end maybe without having to have that other device send a signal back say oh can you resend that because it didn't work it will just not have to do that anymore so I'm not super familiar with the technique I think that might be a basic understanding based on parity of even files there's parity files that can replace err even if you don't have the original same idea I think here now I think one of the most exciting changes though is Bluetooth five now has eight times the capacity for broadcast messages you might think what the heck is that but it's actually kind of interesting there's some good things about this and bad things let me explain broadcast message is kind of like it suggests is a message that is sent out by a Bluetooth device that is connectionless it's not meant to necessarily connect directly between devices it's just kind of like a message that's broadcasted out and this is gonna have more capacity so for example when you go to look at a list of Bluetooth devices that your device might want to connect to you notice how it has very basic information like the name of the device the MAC address and that's it but it doesn't really tell you much about it now it should be able to tell you a lot more information about that device because the outgoing only signal can carry more information so maybe it'll say the name of the device the version the range even how far it is away stuff like that and interestingly Bluetooth itself said that Bluetooth 5.0 is going to redefine the way Bluetooth transmits information that's bold words but basically they're going to be moving away from a system of just purely connecting device to device with Bluetooth and instead move more towards those kind of broadcast messages where you don't necessarily need to connect directly to a device to use it and keep that connection but rather it can actually use other types of information that is just broadcast only from the Bluetooth device now you might be thinking Ari what the heck does that all mean what's the practical implication here well so think of it this way some example might be if you have a Bluetooth device that is only gonna really be broadcasting out words such as maybe a device locator so previously if you had a device locator that would connect to your phone and then that connection based on the strength of the signal would tell you how close you are to a device well now you might not even need to connect directly to that device it would just broadcast out and you could figure out where that thing is based on the signal that it's sending out without having to send anything back another very interesting purpose is so called beacon functions which I think are very interesting but also a double-edged sword so the idea with this is you have a beacon device which just kind of sits there it's broadcasting out with these broadcast messages doesn't expect to have anything connect to it but its proximity based so if you have a device that supports or has these beacon things enabled then when you walk by it within a certain range then it will do something maybe it'll send a push notification to your phone or also again we talk about location tracking you could have these beacon devices around your house and you could have a indoor GPS type thing so based on the strength of these different beacons you could literally pinpoint where devices are in your house so if you lose something it's not like walking around with a metal detector or something saying all the signals stronger here we're getting hot and cold it literally will tell you all right this is where it is so it can triangulate that would be just one use but the other thing which I'm kind of worried about is advertisements and they specifically mention advertisements in the specifications for Bluetooth and kind of the uses that might be for advertisers where say you're in a store and you're walking by a shelf of some product and they put a beacon there where you walk by and it sends a notification to your phone hey buy this thing on sale so I could see how that could get really annoying hopefully there will be settings that will be able to mitigate that you can disable it and it'll be a specific type of message that will distinguish between something that you set up and something a store just randomly put up so you could filter them out I don't know how that's going to work but either way I do think this broadcast message idea is a good idea and the good will probably outweigh the bad and based on all this it kind of makes sense that Bluetooth has said that they're wanting to focus a lot on IOT Internet of Things so bluetooth can now be used more between smart devices instead of just your phone and the device one-to-one so I guess the idea here is now to kind of use Bluetooth more as a whole protocol like a mesh network almost for inside your home that would be like an alternative to Wi-Fi because as you know right now if you want to connect smart devices usually you have to connect them all to the same Wi-Fi point and they talk to each other that way maybe with this you won't have to do that you won't rely on a Wi-Fi signal it can just be directly between the devices but it doesn't have to only connect between those devices if that makes sense so I don't know about you but I think even with those basic examples it sounds pretty cool I think there's a lot of potential here for different devices new types of devices we haven't even thought of that would be able to utilize this new type of connection I don't know like a weather station maybe you put it near you put it outside and now you have a portable weather station that broadcasts to anyone nearby you once the weather or something like that I don't know so yeah there's not much more to say about it bluetooth five pretty much improves in every way you got that double bandwidth four times the range eight times the message capacity it's great so let me know what you think down in the comment section if you want to keep watching I'll put some other videos right here you can click on should find those pretty interesting and again if you want to subscribe be sure to do that and make a few videos a week and also enable notifications if you really want again my social media accounts will be in the description if you want to follow me other places and besides that though guys thanks so much for watching I'll see you next time have a good one\n"