The Bluetooth Special Interest Group has announced that Bluetooth 5 has officially been adopted as a standard and will offer a wider range and faster speed.
If only we’d had this in the days of yore when we exchanged music between feature phones! The Bluetooth Special Interest Group has announced that Bluetooth 5 has officially been adopted as a standard.
Bluetooth 5 – as a next-generation Bluetooth standard – will offer a long range, faster speed, and better broadcast message capacity. That comes in addition to improving interoperability with other wireless technologies.
Read: The next version of Bluetooth will introduce quadrupled range and doubled speeds
When compared to Bluetooth 4.2, Bluetooth 5 offers up to four times the range, twice the speed, and eight times the broadcast message capacity.
When device manufacturers officially integrate the technology into their devices, this will feasibly improve not only coverage throughout households or premises, but will further make connections between devices far more reliable.
In a statement, the Bluetooth Special Interest Group revealed that “This means whole-home and building coverage, as well as new use cases for outdoor, industrial, and commercial applications will be a reality. With the launch of Bluetooth 5, we continue to evolve to meet the needs of IoT developers and consumers while staying true to what Bluetooth is at its core: the global wireless standard for simple, secure, connectivity.”
Bluetooth 5 will also mark a new naming convention for the wireless standard; versions of the technology will be simplified in the future and will drop all mention of version and point number.
The first devices to include Bluetooth 5 will reportedly ship in the next two to six months, and might well appear either on the upcoming Galaxy S8 or Apple’s next iPhone.
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Follow Bryan Smith on Twitter: @bryansmithSA
