Bluetooth - The Best Radio!

It is official now: Bluetooth Smart has reinforced the leading position among low power wireless protocols:

1. It will offer 4x the range. Which means more than a mile line-of-sight with omnidirectional antennas and even more with directional antennas. Suddenly Bluetooth enters the turf of long range WAN technologies, not to mention its ability to cover entire buildings with a single hop.
   
2. It will offer 2x the data rate. Bluetooth is already one of the fastest radios. Not for large transmissions but for many tiny transmissions. Today you can easily have 100 sensor nodes each sending a message to a gateway every second with very low collision rate. That is about 10x more than any 802.15.4 radio can do. With the upcoming speed increase, it will double that number. The double data rate also means the radio duty cycle is cut by half. Which means battery life is doubled. Yes, we are looking into battery powered devices that last 10+ years on a single coin cell.
   
3. It will form a peer-to-peer mesh network. It is not a surprise to us, because we are doing this already today at Silvair and we've contributed our core IP to this standard. 

All the above, and especially the Mesh, open completely new territories for Bluetooth to invade. Bluetooth Smart used to be a connection - oriented radio for hub-and-spoke personal area networks. Considered the radio of choice for smart watches and activity trackers. Suddenly we can use the same radio to synchronously control 500 lights in a hotel lobby or set up an advanced building automation system. And the beauty of all that is, unlike in other standards, all these devices are compatible with each other out of the box. Because Bluetooth guarantees interoperability by enforcing all layers of the communications stack and also makes the onboarding process part of the standard.

So where is the secret sauce you may ask? Why is it so much better than the rest? Why are other standards evolving much slower or not at all? The secret are the people - some of the brightest minds on Earth, empowered by the SIG - the organization that owns that standard and makes that progress possible. We are proud being part of it!