The Bluetooth SIG recently released the core specification for version 6.0 of Bluetooth. Compared to 5.x, it contains a number of changes and some new features, the most interesting probably being Channel Sounding. This builds upon existing features found in Bluetooth 5.x to determine the angle to, and direction of another device using Angle of Arrival (AoA) and Angle of Departure (AoD), but uses a new approach to much more precisely determine these parameters. as defined in the Technical Overview document for this feature.
In addition to this feature, there are also new ways to filter advertising packets, to reduce the number of packets to sift through (Decision-Based Advertising Filtering) and to filter out duplicate packets (Monitoring Advertisers). On a fundamental level, the Isochronous Adaptation Layer (ISOAL) received a new framing mode to reduce latency and increase reliability, alongside frame spacing now being negotiable and additional ways to exchange link layer information between devices.
As with any Bluetooth update, it will take a while before chipsets supporting it become widely available, and for the new features to be supported, but it gives a glimpse of what we can likely expect from Bluetooth-enabled devices in the future.
Does it have better security, I wonder?
ROTFL!
Indeed.
If anything the security will be worse, as the spec won’t have the balls to go ‘no backwards compatibly is allowed for security and making the specification simpler/sane’, so all the current security issues are likely to be ported forward entirely unfixed, or supposedly fixed by adding more complexity to the implementation so adding a whole bunch more flaws. If not flaws in the standard itself than flaws in the execution as its not such a mess..
Damn BLE is getting more and more features. I wonder when we’ll get the cool new LE audio profile in commercial earbuds. I think BLE is also getting quite complicated and developing with it isn’t very nice.
I really wish there was a simple generic radio in smartphones which could send and receive small packets or whatever using GFSK/FSK/OOK on a few ISM bands. It could be very cool for automation.
An 11m transceiver module would be cool. 27 MHz is almost shortwave, still and a traditional band for experiments.
Here in Germany we have Packet Radio (AFSK, 1k2 to 2k4 bazd), APRS (1k2 baud) and SSTV on 11m band. Legally.
The odd, in-between channels are used for ISM. 27, 120 MHz was an r/c frequency, for example.
Considering that Citizen Band is officially legal in the CEPT countries (40ch FM) and that US now has gotten FM, too, it would be worth it.
And alternative would be 433 MHz band, the LPD band.
It’s within 70cm ham band. However, it’s being phased out or so I heard.
Yet another Bluetooth version? Nothing more than “hypothetical” features that readily available devices “could” have has been added to it since 4.0…
I remember a time when Bluetooth was just an wireless serial port.
It was in the Windows 98SE days, when PCMCIA cards for Bluetooth were around.
Some cards that era had even had included a centronics port “dongle” for parallel port devices.
Probably to connect parallel printers, relays cards, flash card readers, cd-rom drives or scanners via Bluetooth.
Sounds odd, but I mean, as long as Windows had drivers for it..
Bluetooth LE was a nice addition, though, I do admit.
Slow, but it allowed coin-cell powered sensors to be operated (weather station, datalogger etc).
I was a blurtooth hater till 5.0 which can transmit high def audio.
these features seem really cool to me and i guess i’m glad someone is working on them but
all i want is to have a glitch while i’m playing a videogame and the glitch is repaired before i notice it. i don’t understand why in practice devices appear to respond poorly to “single dropped packet”, and then once they give up on the connection it takes 5 seconds to reconnect. after 5 seconds, my e-car is already well behind the back of the pack. it just seems to me like something with so much bandwidth should be able to somehow give the impression of being able to reliably carry a dozen bytes 30 times a second, one way or the other.
i’m just surprised i’ve had this exact same perception of bluetooth since the aughts, and vendors like logitech still ship anti-bluetooth dongles to work around it. i don’t know any of the technical reasons. i just want it to work :)
am i dreaming that the bluetooth committee doesn’t know about this defining problem, and one of them will stumble onto my hackaday comment and go “huh? i guess i should have someone look into whether it’s actually usable for any purpose before optimizing every other aspect.” so what if i am?
It is a committee, so they almost certainly all heard about every issue, including the ones none of us have ever noticed (yet), as we are not using it for whatever weird edge case. They just heard it all without paying any real attention as the only thing each member of the committee wants is the spec to do what they want it too well enough they can make money selling products. It doesn’t actually need to be good, just barely functional enough the companies involved don’t have to spend all the money to roll their own solution.
That said on every occasion I’ve had to play with BT stuff in recent years has been fine (don’t much like it, so that isn’t much). The initial connection time is often very noticeable, but beyond that or doing something stupid like walking well out of range it functions. But give me a solid wire, an IR remote etc anyday in preference.
“On a fundamental level, the Isochronous Adaptation Layer (ISOAL) received a new framing mode to reduce latency and increase reliability…”
Yeah right. What’s really going on is how the new BT capabilities will decide which – and how many – ads to shove down your eyeballs.
lol wut?
I don’t think they’re using the word “advertising” the way you think they are.
And if Bluetooth 6.0 is capable of shoving ads down my eyeballs, I wouldn’t even be angry, just impressed.
Really interesting new features, to be sure. But even new(-ish) devices have the same problem old ones do: the eternity it takes to connect two devices, and reconnect them if they drop the connection for any length of time.
Solve that, and I’ll buy Bluetooth stuff again.
Not an issue I’ve had since 5.0. I mean, at a certain distance this is going to happen but almost all TV and streaming boxes these days are Bluetooth with IR built in for fallback. I have never had my fiio USB/BT dongle DAC lose connection to my TV or various other devices so the BT chip and antenna uses matters.
My problem is they keep trying to make it do stuff that was never in the original protocol like extending range and bandwidth significantly even though BT is bad at security so extended range doesn’t help in that department
There is a reason every smartphones uses a random BT MAC address and not the real one.
But you have to admit… not long ago it was straightforward… when we plugged headphones into the phone… they worked…. and when unplugged, they stopped working! Not wondering why the audio suddenly disappeared (to the car the wife just started in the driveway). Solve this issue and you have my endorsement!