It's 2021.

Bluetooth still sucks balls.

That's all.

It's such garbage.

I kinda wish I worked with it to actually understand why, but god damn....

It's also weird how some devices seem pretty stable and work and others are pure shit / frustration.

I don't know much about the internals, but it definitely sucks from a user POV.

The protocol is an over-engineered monster.

And for the physics: it uses the same frequency range as, and therefore interferes with, WiFi.

Great decisions all around.

@Root Also the transfer speed is very slow in my experience. Most people say it is because it is supposed to be power efficient

@Sony-wf-1000xm3 That too, but iirc it’s mostly because of the overhead.

I somehow misread 2021 as 2001.

I have zero issues with BT :D

The only acceptable wireless device is headphones. Everything else is better and cheaper wired

@Root Possibly overengineered, at least badly engineered.

There are things which actually work well with it: Zigbee protocol lamps & switches form a beautiful meshnet which generally just works perfectly.

But Audio...

I'm currently on the toilet (TMI), with wireless headphones on.

It's connected to my PC, but audio is breaking up... At 6m distance. OK, whatever, blame the thick door.

So I'm like, lemme watch some YouTube video on my phone while I poop. If I try to connect my phone, it will fail, because my PC still "owns" that connection.

Also, things like multipoint BT, or using microphone for gaming + high quality stereo for music, are sometimes advertised using weird abbreviated subprotocol names — I've never gotten it to work with random devices.

@bittersweet Bluetooth doesn't have enough bandwidth for 3 audio streams, it's either mono bidirectional or stereo unidirectional. I have also been missing a hijack protocol though.

@bittersweet Also, I don't think BT was ever meant to be long distance. The use case is that the device you're connecting to is either right in front of you or on your body, and even then high quality streams can break if your body gets in between the headset's receiver and the phone. It's just not designed for what you're trying to achieve. Higher powered radio protocols like wifi can do that, but they drain the hub faster.

I'm sure there are things to improve, but performance-over-distance is not one of them, as I'd much rather have 10h of listening to music with my phone and headset than be able to listen from 10m through walls but only for 5h

@homo-lorens

Sucks balls from a user POV...

I cannot un-see this.

@N00bPancakes Most of the bluetooth suck comes from shitty firmware engineers...

@natesymer I don't doubt that, but the scale of suck makes me think that something just .... isn't good enough to make suck happen maybe a little less ;)

But then the world of IoT and small electronics is super price sensitive / cheap so ... yeah they might just suck based on pay and etc.

We need to remember that the 2.4GHz band is:
1. Not very big
2. Very full. If someone has a wifi that can use a free frequencyfor 2.4GHz he is lucky.

@homo-lorens Non-shitty engineers would adjust the transmission power levels dynamically so that you could have both.

@Nanos Cables mean metal, and metal is real.

At least USB-C is pretty great....

I was happy to find I could connect my laptops to my monitor via ONE USB-C cable, video, audio, all USB devices, work great.

Not bluetooth, but connectivity that works.

Like literally every radio tech, Bluetooth works perfect as long as you only have exactly one sender and one receiver on the same spectrum.
Bluetooth uses band hopping and therefore is supposed to be slightly more robust...
But it still is radio tech on a shared spectrum.

So even for headphones: Use the wired version when available.

@Fast-Nop Wouldn't variable power make the electronics more complicated and expensive?

@Nanos I soldered an Arduino-based 240v 12-channel relay with UTP internet once.

I've since renovated my house, and removed all the switching wires and physical switches from the walls.

So everything in the walls is now phase/neutral/ground wires. All devices (Lamps, AC, heat pump, blinds, storm shutters, desk height motors) are "always on".

The lights are Philips Hue (which uses Zigbee), and controlled through a Hue bridge. Overpriced as fuck, but pretty good quality.

The inner blinds are IKEA Fyrtur, the outer shutters (and desks) are custom made and use a 240v zigbee shutter controller.

It's all controlled through a home server with OpenHab (which also makes the Hue bridge its little bitch). That also means you can just slap any brand switch (Philips, IKEA, Arduino, Ubisys, whatever) on the wall, and link it to any other device connected to that server.

OpenHab is also integrated with the Dutch rain radar system, so the shutters auto-close 30 minutes before heavy rain.

@homo-lorens It's integrated anyway. Not like you suddenly need another module or so.

OTOH, increasing the range on a shared medium has its own set of drawbacks, such as allowing fewer users if they actually use the range.

@Root I think the 2.4GHz spectrum is used because back when BT was entering the market, only the 2.4GHz spectrum was freed up.

And for legacy purposes, they never got away from it.

I think BT is mainly such a massive headache due to legacy reasons...

And yes, BT has a huge overhead...

The LL packet has 41-bytes total (when not using the DPLE of BT4.2) of which 14 is other stuff (access address, header, payload length, MIC and CRC).

27-bytes per packet is not a whole lot considering the data is encrypted (which adds overhead on its own)...

Additionally, you must have 150microseconds between packets which also lowers throughput quite a lot.

I remember reading somewhere that the max raw throughput of BT4.2 *with* DPLE was 0.8Mbps where BT5.0 with "LE 2M PHY" reached about 1.4Mbps of raw data...

Which is kinda shit when you compare it to 802.11ah (which can reach either an impressive 200Mbps *or* a - fairly - long range)...

@Root Using the same frequency as wifi is not really much of an issue as there are diffrent ways to modulate the signal so they dont interfere.

@Root there is a good reason why every consumer radio is on the same frequencies: Unlicensed frequencies. Yay for regulations. A lot more frequencies should be freed up for digital communication protocols. Instead of licensed they should certify the devices on it.

@Nanos Well there are physical switches in the breaker closet 😄

But why would the wizardry stop working? All the smart stuff is independent from the internet. Not using voice either. I'm not comfortable using any kind of cameras, smart locks or microphones in my house.

@Nanos Are you a sysadmin?

@N00bPancakes yeah - too many people just don't spend the money for the 10x devs... Or even the 1x guys lol Sometimes they'll hire a fuckin' college student and call it a day!!! Hahaha

@natesymer Developers should unionize, and demand less X's.

0.75X, best I can do. And at least 60 days paid leave!

@bittersweet A 10x dev can do something 10x as fast as the average dev. They're usually compensated several times more than your average dev.

I agree with you - programmers usually get the short end of the employment stick. They could at least give programmers better vision insurance.

@natesymer 10X is a bullshit management lie though.

It's either a stick to hit devs into submission with who ask for a raise "Yeah you perform above average, but for a raise you really need to get to that 10X level"

— or, conversely, something developers use to market themselves.

All developers who use that to describe themselves use tricks to fake metrics (inflating commit/LoC count), or "steal" productivity from the team by picking easier tasks, not writing tests, and having a quantity-over-quality mindset.

In my experience, real productivity difference is maybe 2X, for exceptional developers.

I've also found that it's way more important to understand some "archetype" developer roles, because it's not just about writing certain amounts of code.

Some devs are prototypers/builders, others are polishers, fixers, refiners, cleaners, hackathonners, communicators, etc.

@bittersweet No, it's not bullshit. It's rather the observation that there's hardly a limit to how bad devs can be at the low end.

@rEaL-jAsEs I love you too Jase

It’s the implementations which cause issues with Bluetooth. You get crap quality if the devices have crap chipsets (which is true in most cases because cheap).

Then there’s the shit software support. I’ve seen shitcode in Bluetooth packages because of peeps who don’t understand the absolute basics of communication.

Also, people use Bluetooth where it was not meant to be used. In fact, Apple UWB covers a lot of those scenarios where Bluetooth is not meant to be used.

@-red What annoys me is that it's all based around pairing, when you actually kind of need a "pub/sub channel model".

Most of the time you want a headset listening to audio from at least 2 devices simultaneously: Phone and Laptop/PC.

And some devices, like a bedroom TV, should maybe also broadcast their signal to multiple headsets.

@bittersweet I had a thing that worked like that. It was called AM radio. 🤷‍♂️

@cprn Now we need that, but digital, and encrypted.

Should call it Blueballs

As a guy who is working on Bluetooth for 6 years now here are some updates

1. There are multiple PHY that will help in coexistence with wifi
2. We have long range Bluetooth called coded phy that can operate over a km but with 128kbs (low data rate)
3. Soon le audio will come into picture that will solve a lot of issue with bt classic audio it has a better compression algorithm and supports multiple streams
4. We have dynamic tx power control too but poorly implemented by most people , but if implemented correctly connecting stability improves drastically
5. There a research work going on high accuracy distance measurement and AoA , AoD

Yes Bluetooth suck anything that involves iop as Bluetooth is supposed to , but we do go in iop events to see if our chipsets are performing well with others

Mostly sucking part comes from non standardised implementation from various vendors

@hardfault are there plans for 5 GHz or 60 GHz Bluetooth? Wifi uses them and they are licensefree. I was wondering why bluetooth uses only the 2.4 GHz Frequency, which is literally full of noise, until today?

@hardfault Thanks for working on this. So can you have it done this sprint?

We're nearing 2024 and it's still complete and utter garbage. I'm trying to get a DualSense controller to connect back to Windows after turning it off, and it simply doesn't connect, I have to delete the controller from the list of paired devices and do the whole stupid process of pairing all over again.

My Xbox controller works flawlessly (Windows, huh; but only a few firmware and OS updates later, years on after buying it), but it uses fucking AA BATTERIES and has micro USB, which is such an e-waste producer it should've been banned.