The executive director of the Bluetooth Special Interest Group (SIG), Mark Powell, has announced that the fifth-generation of the Bluetooth technology is set to launch next week.
‘Bluetooth 5’ is going to offer much faster speeds and greater ranges with the current Low Energy specification. The range is going to increase by two folds while the Bluetooth 5 technology will have 4x better speed. The primary focus of this newer generation of bluetooth is for location services that do not rely on the internet such as Bluetooth beacons inside stores.
According to Mark Powell:
“On the technical side, Bluetooth 5 has a lot to offer. As previously announced, it will double the range and quadruple the speed of low energy Bluetooth transmissions. But there’s more. Bluetooth 5 will also provide significant new functionality for connectionless services like location-relevant information and navigation. By adding significantly more capacity to advertising transmissions, Bluetooth 5 will further propel the adoption and deployment of beacons and location-based services to users around the world.”
The standard has now just been finalized. However, we won’t be seeing any products supported with ‘Bluetooth 5’ before early 2017. More is expected on the technology by the Bluetooth SIG next week, on June 16th.
