23 ms·

Ask HN: Why is Bluetooth so unreliable?

• gjvc 9y ago
  From an experiential view, I say "crowded spectrum" My bluetooth keyboard takes ages to associate at work (which is close to a mainline rail station), but at home in the relative country, it works smoothly.
  • akgerber 9y ago
    I wonder how much of this is related to hardware generally being developed and tested in isolated suburban office parks as opposed to big cities.
    • izacus 9y ago
      No matter where you develop the hardware, you really can't get over the fact that you have a small crowded spectrum where bunch of devices keep trying to transmit over you and causing collisions.
• linuxlizard 9y ago
  Because it's not as popular as WiFi or Ethernet or USB. It hasn't had the decades of hard core, hard knocks field usage of WiFi/Ethernet/USB. So the chipsets are less robust to errors, are less sensitive to highly noisy environments. The drivers aren't as battle tested as the other connectivity. WiFi in its initial days (802.11b) reminds me of bluetooth right now. Quirky, bad tools, weird errors. But WiFi caught on and manufacturers started throwing $B at R&D for better chips and better drivers for those chips. Bluetooth just has a problem with scale.
  • thatBilly 9y ago
    Wouldn't WiFi in its initial days be 802.11 legacy or systems prior to the IEEE standard such as WaveLAN? You are right though. I vaguely remember messing about with WaveLAN and I don't recall it being as flaky as some of the early 802.11 systems.
  • marricks 9y ago
    I wonder if the tools we commonly used Bluetooth for are more noticable if they error too. If my Bluetooth mouse stutters for a quarter or a second, I'll likely notice and be angry, but if a YouTube video stutters loading, it'd have buffered and likely hidden that.
  • knowuh 9y ago
    I thought 802.11 and BlueTooth were both brought to market in the late 90s. Am I mistaken? Your statement seems like a 'first out of the gate', or 'battle tested' argument. They are approximately the same age, no? They aren't competing technologies; they have differing use cases. One has enjoyed wide success, and the other is still stumbling along. Is it a case of unclear standards, bad implementations, or lack of interest in the blue-tooth use case of wireless accessory devices?
  • api 9y ago
    You're not wrong, but I had early wifi (even on Linux) and Bluetooth today is worse. Bluetooth is not a new standard. I've dealt with it's internals to a small degree. It's overengineered and excessively stateful, leading to a lot of edge cases and failure modes that just do not need to exist. It could have been orders of magnitude simpler and nearly stateless and it would have been a dream. State is evil in protocols and should be avoided if at all possible. It really reeks of vendor clusterfuck with lots of requirement overloading, which is very typical in modern protocols that are vomited forth by consortia. WiFi is at least a little bit cleaner owing to the fact that it had its requirements clearly specified: Ethernet over the air.
  • gargravarr 9y ago
    Wifi and Bluetooth rose to consumer attention around the same time, and bluetooth appealed to people who weren't necessarily 'techy' since it was adopted heavily for car hands-free kits. Businesspeople outfitted company cars with it soon after it was released for legal reasons. I wouldn't say adoption was lower than wifi, in fact bluetooth was probably more rapidly adopted because, since it's linking simpler devices, it's cheaper (wifi needs the whole TCP/IP stack underneath it), but you're probably right in that it has seen less investment in error robustness than wifi - momentary loss of voice through your handsfree is usually tolerable, wifi dropping a large number of packets is not.
  • tinus_hn 9y ago
    WiFi is complicated too, you just don't see the problems most of the time. The setup people generally use at home tends to work and the setup you use in large deployments is typically managed by people who turn off the features that don't work with the devices people use on the network. Still if you start with features like the fast handoff or the more obscure authentication combinations you'll see the problems.
    • fenwick67 9y ago
      Yes! Wifi doesn't always work either. Especially back in the A/B days it was awful.
  • dfox 9y ago
    In early 2000's I used BT (with DUN profile IIRC) for in-home wireless network for the sole reason that it was more reliable than wifi (at the same time my consulting usually involved various wifi brokenness).
  • kalleboo 9y ago
    I wouldn't say WiFi is reliable either, especially once you add the whole stack of protocols run over it (DHCP, SMB, etc) that are equivalent to the stuff that's handled by Bluetooth and its profiles.
• bhouston 9y ago
  I never have Bluetooth issues in my Rav4 between any of my phones (ZTE, OnePlus), it is perfect always. I can not emphasize enough how amazing it is. My and my wife's Fitbit have constant Bluetooth issues to our phones. This is completely and utterly annoying. Driver related? Not sure.
  • leggomylibro 9y ago
    Probably hardware-related. Good, or at least thouroughly-tested and characterized, design can make or break high-frequency RF applications. Check out the PCB guidelines for the popular NRF51822 Bluetooth tranceiver: https://devzone.nordicsemi.com/blogs/655/general-pcb-design-guidelines-for-nrf51/ https://devzone.nordicsemi.com/blogs/655/general-pcb-design-... It barely scratches the surface, and in reality there will always be some trial and error as other nearby circuit elements can cause unpredictable interference or feedback. But it's a lot more finnicky than laying out an Arduino board.
  • thinkpad20 9y ago
    > Driver related? Not sure. Well, is the bluetooth as good when your wife is driving the Rav4?
    • jdeibele 9y ago
      He meant software drivers, not people drivers.
• mchannon 9y ago
  Simple- it inhabits the same band almost everything else inhabits- 2.4GHz. To an extent, the reason Bluetooth is unreliable is the same reason most Wifi is unreliable in crowded areas. There's a lot of appliances that use that bandwidth over incompatible standards. Even worse are the "spark" kind of 2.4GHz appliances that don't play nice, like wireless camera systems and baby monitors. If your strong-signal wifi or bluetooth keeps dropping, it's far more likely to be one of those at fault than anything else.
  • enraged_camel 9y ago
    Yes. This is why I stopped using wireless keyboard and mouse. Despite the fact that they are within close proximity to their receivers, there is frequent signal instability, resulting in spikes in input lag and outright input loss.
  • thinkpad20 9y ago
    Why is that range so popular? When presented with what appears (perhaps naively) to be a vast range of frequencies to use, why do so many wireless specs settle on the same thing?
    • sjburt 9y ago
      Its an ISM band and not heavily regulated. There are only a few such bands.
    • trevyn 9y ago
      It's unlicensed worldwide -- free and easy to use. Same as the 900MHz and 5GHz bands. It's a political/regulatory decision, not technical. (And the higher the frequency, generally the more bandwidth is available, but chipsets are a little more expensive.)
      • brianwawok 9y ago
        The technical reason is they do not travel through walls that well, so they would make very bad bands for things like radio stations or cell phones.. so why not give it to people to use for local devices.
• ComputerGuru 9y ago
  A big part of the reason "Bluetooth" is unreliable is that there is no one "Bluetooth." Each manufacturer's implementation differs in strength and weakness, and depending on the potentially shoddy chips in the devices you are connecting to, a different Bluetooth standard will be used. I have Bluetooth devices years old that I've never had problems with, and others that are a constant nightmare. The software stack behind the Bluetooth is also a major component in the reliability question.
• gdulli 9y ago
  My company bought me a $150 pair of noise canceling headphones last year, it was my first experience with Bluetooth. After a month I was back to using the $10 earphones that I've had for over 10 years. It turns out reliability and convenience was more important than blocking noise. To be fair there were problems other than Bluetooth. The headphones were trying to be smart, if they sensed you taking them off they'd pause the music for you. Except it didn't always work so instead of pausing the music when I took off the headphones, which is ingrained and reflexive and automatic and no trouble at all, now I had to pay attention every time to whether the auto-pause worked and then either pause myself or not. And sometimes I'd adjust the headphones slightly to scratch my ear or something and the music would pause. Sigh.
  • buryat 9y ago
    How is it related to Bluetooth?
    • bluGill 9y ago
      Another bluetooth device that is not used because it is annoying to use instead of useful. This isn't the fault of bluetooth, but it adds to the reputation that bluetooth devices are more hassle than they are worth. The cheap headphones he went back to don't have the annoying misfeatures that he hates.
      • gdulli 9y ago
        I don't know if the unreliability is the fault of Bluetooth, the product, the drivers, or the OS. Or if it's inherent to wirelessness which can't ever be expected to work as well as normal headphones with any protocol because the problem is just significantly harder. Regardless, headphones have been a solved problem for a long time and I'll use what's always worked.
        • emodendroket 9y ago
          I'll often wear headphones while doing housework or yardwork and not having the wire in your way really makes it much better.
• bjt2n3904 9y ago
  This isn't the first time I've talked on this. I've had some experience with bluetooth on Linux, and as a radio guy. The answer is there are problems from Layer 1 to Layer 7, needless complexity, and design by committee. Bluetooth is an EXTREMELY complex radio protocol on Layer 1. It's like a mating dance between scorpions in the middle of a freeway. High chance something gets messed up. Layer 1 keeps drastically changing too. Bluetooth 1 and 2 use completely different modulations, and are not backwards compatible. Bluetooth 3 simply was an extension to 2. "Let's agree over Bluetooth 2.0 to use WiFi instead." Bluetooth 4, while much simpler, uses an entirely different scheme. Instead of a "general purpose" wireless network like WiFi, Bluetooth tried to be application specific. Except the only profiles everyone wants are mice, wireless audio, and fitness trackers. If you look at the application layer spec, it reeks of design by committee. Everyone haphazardly jammed their pet projects together, and there are redundant and vestigial parts everywhere. The Linux side of BlueZ is abysmal. Honestly, I don't even know how anyone does anything with Bluetooth on Linux besides a mouse and keyboard. And barely even that. As much as I hate on the protocol, the Layer 1 spec is truly ahead of it's time, in some areas. Watching two radios frequency hop, and negotiate to avoid a congested wifi channel was unreal.
  • jeroen94704 9y ago
    > Watching two radios frequency hop, and negotiate to avoid a > congested wifi channel was unreal. Exactly. As I said in another comment, we did a test in a very busy office space and didn't loose a single bit of data @ several 100kbit/s over a week transmitting continously. We could see it hopping on the sniffer.
    • bjt2n3904 9y ago
      True, as long as both transceivers are 100% to spec. The problem is, it's a VERY large and complicated spec, and it's easy to make one little slip and have to completely renegotiate the connection.
  • inetknght 9y ago
    But bluetooth keeps getting rammed down our throats with bluetooth hardware being installed on motherboards (sometimes not even as removable modules) and bluetooth software in the O.S. turned on by default (lolsecurity), sometimes even at the BIOS/EFI layer. Add in all the complexity of different bluetooth versions and you have something that "seemingly everyone" has but few people reliably use.
• niggahiga16 9y ago
  fuck you, it is not on mac
• niggahiga16 9y ago
  fuck you, it is not unreliable on Mac, get a fucking mac and iphone
• drewg123 9y ago
  For me, the biggest problem with BT is that BT audio is almost entirely unbuffered. I wear a set of BT headphones connected to a fitness watch (Polar M600) when running. When the BT connection from the watch to the headphones is briefly blocked by part of my sweaty body (think arm movements when running), the BT signal is interrupted and the music cuts in and out with every stride. If BT audio could be buffered for 15-20 seconds, this would not be a problem.
  • raverbashing 9y ago
    That would require ~1Mb of memory (or potentially more), also would be unfeasible for some applications (like phone calls)
    • arghwhat 9y ago
      Phone calls use a different Bluetooth profile, so that's largely irrelevant. 1 megabit (did you mean megabyte?) of memory is not worth noting. It could be integrated into the IC that contains the entire system for headphones quite easily. That system already has memory in there anyway.
      • raverbashing 9y ago
        1 Megabyte and your average BT audio device has less memory than you think Standards have not been made considering today's availability of memory and resources
        • Paul_S 9y ago
          Usually far less than 1 MB. It's about cost, footprint and power consumption.
        • arghwhat 9y ago
          I'm not sure how much memory you think I assume is present. My point is that it would be a possible and simple extension, not that it is already present. There is currently exactly as much memory as needed. That does not make it unrealistic to extend it with a buffer. Cheap SBC-only devices certainly won't do it as those are solely about cost optimization, but the beefier, pricier AAC/Apt-X multi-device capable bluetooth audio sink solutions that sell for premiums could easily incorporate a bit of extra memory. 1Mb (megabit) would give a few seconds of buffering, which would be sufficient. It'll take a bit more silicon, but nothing absurd. Hell, it could be external memory over SPI, so integrators could select buffering capability themselves, without significant cost/silicon area increase of the bt chipset However, to actually utilize buffering, you'd need a higher bandwidth link than is required for live playback to catch up after connectivity dips. Buffering by itself only adds latency. The question is then whether you'd want to use your link bw for resilience of low quality audio, or instant high quality audio...
• gargravarr 9y ago
  Part of the issue is that bluetooth as a whole is nothing more than a wireless serial connection. It's the various protocols built on top of it that determine its stability. The Bluetooth SIG only really control the pairing between the two devices, a low layer. You're hoping that the company you buy stuff from has implemented the protocol correctly, over which the SIG has no control.
  • dfox 9y ago
    Traditional "slow" IrDA is essentially HDLC over UART with packed based protocol stack over that, that among other things can emulate dumb reliable duplex pipe (TCP-like) that is usually exposed as virtual serial port, bluetooth is similar, with significantly larger set of "other things". Other relation to serial port is that it is usual interface between the HCI and host system (using fairly highlevel protocol). In the lower layers it is frame based protocol that has no relation to serial ports.
• js2 9y ago
  The last few years, I have not had trouble with BT, but maybe it's because I simplified my use cases to ones which work after early failures. Here's what works for me and never fails: - Macbook to Apple bluetooth mouse - iPhone 6s to late model Mazda infotainment system - iPhone 6s BTLE connection to Garmin Forerunner watch
  • Analemma_ 9y ago
    That's been my experience with BT as well... basically it's the "Swiss cheese model" where every BT implementation has problems, but you can sometimes find pairs of devices which don't hit each others holes, and once they work, tend to keep working. So you keep trying different sets of devices, and then once you've found the right ones, cling to them like a drowning man to a rock :)
  • gonewest 9y ago
    That hasn't been my experience -- the same physical devices work for a while and then fail usually after an OS update. My iphone6 paired inconsistently with my car until iOS 10.2 then it failed completely. Then the dealer did a routine maintenance and it started pairing again. Until 10.3, and now it's hit and miss. Plantronics headset used to be my foolproof solution for Google Hangout and Bluejeans meetings. Now it won't pair successfully with the MacBook at all. Nor with the iPhone 6. It's the "moving target" aspect that is most infuriating for me.
  • stronglikedan 9y ago
    Seconded (thirded?). Daily user of BT keyboard, mouse, and headset. Nightly user of BT connection between phone and speaker. I had my fair share of lumps in the beginning, enough to put me off of it completely until 4 or 5 years ago, but it's been a primarily pleasant experience ever since.
• evilduck 9y ago
  I have a lot of gear in the Apple ecosystem that uses Bluetooth and I don't consider it unreliable at all. I use at least 6 different Bluetooth devices all day, every day (MBP, keyboard, trackpad, iPhone, Watch, Airpods, with additional car pairing, portable speaker and iPad pairings) in close proximity to a bunch of other developers behaving similarly. Looking around I can count at least 40 BT devices in active use around the office and I would still characterize my Bluetooth devices as more reliable than any wifi AP I've ever used.
• IgorPartola 9y ago
  This is a daily goddamn struggle for me. My Macbook Pro routinely forgets about my Apple trackpad, and the only thing that fixes it is restarting the laptop. The sound system on the laptop often selects the wrong mic for the input when a BT headset is connected. My iPhone keeps switching between headset and internal speaker/mic when on a call. Pairing the same device to multiple hosts (laptop and phone) is like birthing a hedgehog backwards. And let's not forget where you try to initiate pairing from a laptop or phone instead of the device. Why even provide the damn buttons to do it if they never work?
  • 0xdb 9y ago
    Interestingly, that are probably the only devices that work flawlessly for me. MacBook Pro in ~3 different environments, automatically pairs input devices and speakers and selects the audio I/O accordingly (i think it switches to the BT device if it was the active I/O when it was last connected). Same thing with the iPhone when paired with the Car BT. But with basically all other devices I made the same experiences. I find myself regularly reinstalling BT and audio drivers on a HP elitebook because it drops connections and can't find devices afterwards.
  • sseveran 9y ago
    I would love a wired trackpad. Every couple of weeks I probably burn 20 minutes or so when either my home office trackpad or my office track pad just stop being seen by my MBP. The fast that my apple device frequently can't talk to my apple device has kept me from pushing much deeper in other bluetooth devices as it is bound to be worse.
    • glhaynes 9y ago
      I would love a wired trackpad. You can use Apple's current trackpad (the "Magic Trackpad 2", I believe) on a Mac (at least) via USB even with Bluetooth entirely off. Edit: I believe (but have not confirmed) that their current keyboard works similarly. Their current mouse does not, at least in any really useful way, because its Lightning port is on the bottom.
• jonbarker 9y ago
  I would buy a wireless audio speaker that uses NFC instead of bluetooth to connect to Android or iPhone. You would have to set the phone on the device but that would be a small price to pay if the connection were more reliable.
  • splitbrain 9y ago
    that's not how NFC works.
  • hnal943 9y ago
    Do you really have problems with Bluetooth connection when the speaker is touching the phone?
    • jonbarker 9y ago
      I am in the Apple ecosystem and the "pair" process is incredibly slow, even when it works. I'm arguing about seconds here but it's usually like 15 seconds.
  • c22 9y ago
    I would love if all my Bluetooth devices used nfc to set up pairing.
    • jonbarker 9y ago
      Yes, maybe pairing could be accelerated with NFC, then switching to bluetooth for extended range and bandwidth.
  • metaphorm 9y ago
    NFC has an effective range of about 20cm, bluetooth (and wifi) up to about 50m. these have completely different use cases, and if you're limiting yourself to 20cm range for a semi-permanent fixture (like speakers) you might as well run a wire.
  • borplk 9y ago
    NFC has distance and bandwidth limits.
• baybal2 9y ago
  1. fragile encoding schemes 2. fragile modulation techniques (uwb would've been a "final solution" to the problem, but died to patent trolls) 3. interference from wifi (try using bt mouse while downloading an hd movie) 4. because of three different "wire protocols" But the upside is that BT super cheap to implement, and thus ubiquitous
• jdlyga 9y ago
  I've always had trouble with bluetooth devices until I got AirPods. Whatever bluetooth setup they're using is very reliable. I use them with my phone, windows computer, ubuntu work machine, and I rarely ever have connection issues.
• Duhck 9y ago
  I've spent the better half of 3 years building products on the 2.4ghz spectrum (WiFi and BLE). Most of the issues in this thread are related to poor hardware design more than a crowded spectrum. While the spectrum is in fact crowded in metropolitan areas, most Bluetooth communication doesn't require much bandwidth and can handle error prone areas with ease. While the frequency hopping helps a ton on BL (and WiFi for that matter), the issues people outlined are due to: 1) Shitty firmware 2) Shitty hardware Antenna design is black magic and only a few firms in the US do it well. It took us almost 10 months to fully design and test our antenna assembly(s) with a very capable third party firm. It took dozens of trips to a test chamber, a dozen computer simulations that take a day to run, and PCB samples that take days to verify. They have to be tuned every time copper or mechanical parts move as well. It's a real pain and most Bluetooth products use garbage chip antennas and baluns or reference designs for antennas. This increases the sensitivity to failure and provides a generally shitty experience. Most of your product interactions around bluetooth are budget products connected on one side of the equation (e.g. a $50 bluetooth headset). So despite how capable your Mac or iPhone is, if you have a garbage headset on the other side with poor antenna design, it'll be a disaster of an experience.
  • samstave 9y ago
    >2) Shitty hardware Antenna design is black magic and only a few firms in the US do it well. It took us almost 10 months to fully design and test our antenna assembly(s) with a very capable third party firm. I think that you are remiss if you don't actually name the companies/produucts/devices which are designed well then.... There was a company in Aptos/Santa Cruz who was designing the antennas for a lot of Lockheed stuff back in about 2006/2007 or so who we went to for antenna designs for our active RFID devices - but I cant recall for the life of me the name of the company now...
    • Duhck 9y ago
      As a rule of thumb, the notable product manufacturers like Apple, Samsung, Nokia, Microsoft, Amazon, etc, have extremely capable RF design teams. Your run of the mill bluetooth headset, mouse, or keyboard likely does not spend the time on the RF design beyond "does it work".
• synaesthesisx 9y ago
  Not 100% sure on this, but I believe devices utilizing Apple's W1 chip use a combination of Bluetooth + WiFi (WiFi for the initial handshake upon connecting probably or something like that). If anyone's ever used AirPods it's amazing how reliable they are compared to other bluetooth headsets.
  • saturdaysaint 9y ago
    AirPods pair and work fine when Wi-Fi is off, yet they aren't even detected by the phone if Bluetooth is off. That would indicate to me that WiFi isn't involved?
  • MBCook 9y ago
    You're incorrect, they do not support Wi-Fi. I think you were thinking of the chips in the watches. I have AirPods, and they were pretty fantastically. I've had occasional issues but it's rare enough it doesn't bother me at all.
• FRex 9y ago
  Oh wow. And I through it's reliable. I used it only a few times on smartphones and laptops (I like my mice and keyboard with cables) but I still remember what a big deal it was compared to infrared and how mobile phones in early 2000s would lose connection and the only sure way to use IR was putting them next to each other on a flat table with the IR thingies of their physically touching(!). That makes me a little less excited about my plans of getting Dual Shock 4 for my PC for gaming.
• nthcolumn 9y ago
  I have nothing to add only 'yes me too my how I have suffered', the countless crappy bluetooth devices I have connected and disconnected and hours and hours I have wasted trying to get them paired with various linux boxes, nearly all in short order choosing death rather than do my bidding. I am looking at one right now currently unconnected. 'Dummy device'. Why indeed.
• AceyMan 9y ago
  Disclaimer: non-technical anecdotal evidence here— I had a colleague for a time who's dad was a hardware engineer with Toshiba & worked with/on their part of the specification Working Group. His pop said that the whole BT stack was unambiguously a steaming pile of poo from the get-go, and it was nearly miraculous it functioned as well as it did¹. At that I had to chuckle, seeing how I'd wager that each of us have had enough woggy experiences with the tech to agree with the point he made so plainly. But I do love the chosen icon & the history behind it, viś-a-viś the name ("Bluetooth"), so it's not all bad <wink>. --- ¹—this was around 2010 or so, to add some context wrt the relevant timeline(s).
• api_or_ipa 9y ago
  I used to absolutely abhor BT, but in the past few years it seems to have gotten really, really good about picking up, and maintaining a decent connection. Since then, I've picked up BT headphones, BT keyboard + mouse (Apple), and a nifty little waterproof BT speaker. Now, the only issue I sometimes have is when I want to connect to a new host device. Other than that, BT has been really nice to me.
  • tomcam 9y ago
    Let's trade lives
    • thebiglebrewski 9y ago
      Lmao. Bluetooth is so random about working or not! So many conflicting views in this thread.
  • rconti 9y ago
    I came here to say this. I've owned lots of Bluetooth devices, dating back to an Ericsson T39 and some kind of Bluetooth headset in 2002. It seems clear that at some point in the past couple of years, something changed, bigtime. Not sure if it's Bluetooth 4, or what. It's always been terrible. Even just connecting my phone to my Tivoli Audio speakers from 2 feet away was a nightmare. I'd have to try to reconnect 10 times before it would finally work. This is across dozens of devices and now more than a dozen years. My Mac stuff is mostly better although I found when I had a deskmate, in a room full of 40 people using multiple Bluetooth devices, sometimes my trackpad would disconnect and have a hard time reconnecting. When he quit, everything went back to normal, then when they hired his replacement (and gave him different equipment), the problem came back. That said, recently it's been an absolute miracle. I bought a new VW Golf with bluetooth. It's AMAZING. It connects quickly, every time, and works flawlessly. After having a positive experience with a friend's bluetooth headphones, I bought some Bose QC35 bluetooth headphones, and THEY are amazing! they even connect to 2 devices at once so my computer can send me alerts while I listen to music streaming from my phone. And the range is outstanding -- 60+ feet through multiple tile walls in my office building. One time I got into my car wearing my headphones (on a conference call), started the car, shut off my headphones, and the call magically transferred to my car, instantly. Based on THOSE good experiences I bought some Jaybird X3 running headphones, which also work amazingly well. I tried some Outdoor Tech Chips helmet speakers for my snowboard helmet, and it was IMMEDIATELY back to 2005. The sound would have static and crackle. When I turned my head left with my phone in my right pants pocket (the antenna is apparently in the left earpiece), it would LOSE CONNECTION. Hell, sometimes even sitting on the ground with my head bent, about 2 feet line of sight, it would lose connection. I took them back to REI and bought a Sena Snowtalk 10 so now my ski helmet is back to multi-room range as 2017 Bluetooth intended. I'm interested in following this comments thread to better understand the tech, but I simply can't believe how good it's gotten. I'll look at my phone and it will tell me the charge of my bluetooth headphones and apple watch, and everything JUST WORKS, thanks god, for once.
• linsomniac 9y ago
  I gave up on Bluetooth at home around a year ago. Not sure what it is, but I'd pretty much have to put my phone right next to the bluetooth speaker for it it work reliably. Might as well use a cable. I had high hopes for Google Chromecast Audio for my music at work and at home. Probably my fault for jinxing myself by asking "What could possibly be worse than Bluetooth?" Chromecast Audio has definitively answered that. For one thing, you can't limit who can interact with the Chromecast. Anyone on the network can see it. At work, my music would usually pause ~4 times a day as someone else's phone would see it and connect to it. I'd have to set up a new wifi network that only I could use to fix this. Since I only listen to music a few hours a day, that's pretty frequent. It also gets confused if I leave work and then try to use Google Play Music elsewhere: my Google Home in the bathroom will play a song and then stop, I think because "google play is being used on another device", but it doesn't tell you that. Maybe I should just go back to using something like a Raspberry Pi with access to my music library, it still is mostly songs I have the CDs for and ripped, though I've added probably 50-100 songs over the last year on Google Play, my 600 CDs I have all in FLACs.
  • wlesieutre 9y ago
    I've never used a Chromecast Audio, but their website explicitly mentions a password and a guest mode w/ 4-digit PIN to let other people play music on it. Sounds like yours isn't working as intended, could it be something else causing the pauses? https://support.google.com/chromecast/answer/6279388?hl=en https://support.google.com/chromecast/answer/6279388?hl=en EDIT: jordanthoms points out that "guest mode" is for letting people stream audio without giving them your wifi password. Once they're on the network everyone has access.
    • jordanthoms 9y ago
      That's for allowing people to cast to the Chromecast if it's nearby even without connecting to the WiFi - if you are connected to the same WiFi as the Chromecast no password is required.
      • wlesieutre 9y ago
• howard941 9y ago
  I switched from a bluetooth dongle of unknown provenance to a more powerful Zoom (brand) class 1 dongle and hung it from a usb cable off of a lighting fixture in my home office. I get complete coverage to a Jabra headset of a rather large screened in porch despite having to penetrate my pudding head, two interior walls, and one exterior wall. The class 2 dongle barely worked outside.
• Spooky23 9y ago
  Is it? I'm a pretty heavy user if Bluetooth in a few different use cases and it's pretty reliable for me. Best way to improve reliability is to avoid dodgy or counterfeit radios in crappy electronics.
  • petercooper 9y ago
    Same here. Been using Bluetooth heavily for about 10 years with no problems I can recall. Certainly far more reliable than wi-fi where devices and routers frequently need restarting for no obvious reason.
  • crispinb 9y ago
    Likewise, I have no problem with it (for mouse, trackpad and keyboard, all in all-day use). I'd still prefer wired for anything stationary (keyboard & trackpad in my case), just to eliminate the entirely superfluous batteries. In a world where that option isn't available, however, bluetooth works perfectly well for me.
• 80211 9y ago
  I learned a lot about Bluetooth with an Ubertooth Bluetooth dongle. It also let me realize how many security issues (side channel leaks, especially) exist that can't be easily fixed.
• moonbug22 9y ago
  You only need to look at the page count of the specs to know why.
  • joatmon-snoo 9y ago
    ...holy shit. I'm now amazed that any Bluetooth devices work at all.
• jimmies 9y ago
  I have a Linux computer (Dell Chromebook 13) connected to the Microsoft Mouse 3600 Bluetooth (BLE 4?) and it was rock solid. The mouse picks up immediately whenever the computer is on. It was almost miraculous how well it works. The mouse is really quite darn responsive too. That is, I use the cutting edge Linux distribution (Ubuntu 17.10) -- it was pretty darn painful even on 17.04. I have another keyboard that is on Bluetooth 3.0 that fucking disconnects every other day. So YMMV - I think BLE mice and keyboards are much better in terms of 'just works' unless you pair them with a whole bunch of devices.
  • city41 9y ago
    I have a Marshall bluetooth speaker and I find it pairs and works more reliably with my Linux laptop (Ubuntu 16.04 on a Thinkpad) than it does with my Mac laptop (Sierra on a 2012 MBPr)
  • compuguy 9y ago
    That sums up bluetooth in general. Trying to use a bluetooth device with multiple devices/computers is a pain.
• rikkus 9y ago
  As much as I dislike proprietary protocols, I'd be greatly in favour of Apple deciding to make a replacement for Bluetooth that works with all their products - and Just Works. It'd be no use to me, as my only Apple product currently is an iPhone, but if I saw that Appletooth Just Worked, I'd be looking at diving (back) into their ecosystem. I know some people are saying Bluetooth works perfectly between their Apple products, but plenty of people are saying it doesn't, too.
  • kalleboo 9y ago
    Considering how poorly AirDrop works I don't think I'd trust them to get it right.
• digi_owl 9y ago
  I would try eliminating Bluez5 and Pulseaudio first...
• blumomo 9y ago
  For programmers using Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE 4.0) on Linux/BlueZ, we're working on this handy BLE GATT library for Python: https://github.com/getsenic/gatt-python https://github.com/getsenic/gatt-python BlueZ/GATT is very stable to our experience and supports most functions such as BLE device discovery, listing services and characteristics, reading/writing/subscribing values from/to characteristics.
• rapjr9 9y ago
  I've been working for years with a major vendors Bluetooth chip and it's been a nightmare to work with. They change the chips firmware often and have completely changed the libraries API more than once. They will obsolete older versions of the chip that your software runs well on, forcing you to port to the new API's. Their example programs generally work standalone, but if you want to combine two functions into one program you'll often find you need to use features not included in either example program (e.g., try using peripherals such as SPI on the chip along with the radio and you'll find the SPI example code crashes the BLE stack.) They've been promising the ability to be able to act as Central and Peripheral simultaneously for years and have only recently included an example program to actually do that (labeled "experimental", it hasn't been stable for me with a simultaneous Central and Peripheral connection.) However, we're a small group and they apparently have geared their efforts to working with larger manufacturers who hire them to write drivers and glue code so continually altering their API's may be a way to enhance their consulting business. If you want to do something fairly standard (connect to a sensor) you can likely accomplish that fairly easily; however if you want to do anything unusual be prepared to have to reverse engineer their abstractions. Any small device maker who wants to use Bluetooth in their design will be hard pressed to find the resources to deal with the continual changes.
• jbg_ 9y ago
  I know this is a little tangential, but this brought some simmering anger back to the surface. Just today I was trying to communicate with a bluetooth device that provides a serial channel. Back in the day I used to just run "rfcomm bind <mac-address> <channel>". But it turns out BlueZ decided to deprecate (read: stop building by default) the rfcomm command in favour of... wait for it... a barely-documented D-Bus interface. How much do you have to hate your users before you decide to take away a useful, functional executable and replace it with an unspecified interface over D-Bus that requires hours of research to use rather than 30 seconds of reading a manpage?
• kahlonel 9y ago
  I'll just leave here that the "official" linux bluetooth stack (i.e. BlueZ) has dogshit documentation.
• thewhitetulip 9y ago
  Despite multiple apps of the likes of shareit, I find bluetooth to be the only mechanism of data transfer that just works. SHareit and the likes of it get new versions which break on my Android 7 for each upgrade and it is a PITA to get it working for different android versions, for some reason it does not show my device on a moto phone and I have to use the hacks like get a file from the other device to my device and then send something on the established connection. but there is one thing, bluetooth is not useful if the file is big.
• airbreather 9y ago
  Plantronics seem to do it substantially better than anyone else somehow.