The next-gen wireless transmission standard dubbed Bluetooth 5 is poised to make its debut in the coming week. The new specification will reportedly be four times faster and have double the range of predecessor Bluetooth 4.2.
On Friday, June 10, the Bluetooth Special Interest Group (SIG)'s Executive Director Mark Powell revealed in an email that the new specification would be launched on Thursday, June 16, in London.
The Core Specification Working Group of SIG is presently putting the finishing touches on Bluetooth 5, ahead of its industry adoption.
"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," noted Powell.
Powell also disclosed that the next-gen wireless technology brings considerable performance improvements over Bluetooth 4.2. The new standard will quadruple the speed and have two times more range than the current Bluetooth 4.2.
For those of you wondering why the group has chosen the name Bluetooth 5 - without a point after the "5" - it is a conscious decision so as to simply the specification's marketing, making it easier for laypeople to understand the new wireless standard.
Presently, the "advertising packet" is 47bytes. Of this 31bytes data is available. While the SIG is yet to reveal the size of the advertising packets for Bluetooth, it is this aspect which increases the ability for Bluetooth devices to transmit more detailed data.
For the unfamiliar, the advertising packet in the Bluetooth spec basically enables Bluetooth-supported devices to transmit tiny snippets of data to other devices that are also Bluetooth compatible even when these two gadgets are not connected or paired with each other.
To illustrate, when one attempts to pair their Bluetooth speaker with their smartphone, one can espy the device's name prior to pairing so as to differentiate it from other Bluetooth devices in range. This is enabled thanks to advertising packets.
The details pertaining to whether prevailing Bluetooth hardware will have compatibility with the new standard post a firmware update is not known.
The quadrupled speed and doubling of the range which Bluetooth 5 will bring in its folds will undoubtedly be welcomed by consumers. An exact date of release for Bluetooth 5 is not known and Powell only noted second half of this year "and beyond."
Going by past release schedule cycles, one can expect Bluetooth 5 to make its way to consumer devices by end 2016 or early 2017.
