5 ms·

I'm always curious why bluetooth is such a terrible piece of technology. Did anyone write blogposts analyzing what went wrong?

Mindwipe 6y ago
It's pretty simple really. It tries to do a lot of complicated things, and it's underspecified so it's possible to have compliant devices that behave wildly differently between vendors. It also rarely breaks compatibility so there's a lot of cruft for ancient devices.
- jeffnappi 6y ago
  This is the exact reason it is challenging. There is a lot of variance in how each manufacturer implements it. You might compare it to the browser wars of old - you've got many different players adding various extensions in different ways etc. The actual radio technology and low power consumption are phenomenal, the problems arise mostly around protocol implementation oddities.
wuuwoo 6y ago
Any analysis would be less than insightful unless it comes from someone who sat in the meetings and helped write the standard. FWIW Bluetooth isn't "terrible." It's pretty remarkable we can get all sorts of devices to communicate with eachother wirelessly and at low powers with pretty decent bandwidth. And now you can buy a Bluetooth stack on a chip from a variety of vendors. The bigger issue with Bluetooth is that failure conditions are mostly an afterthought by device manufacturers, and Bluetooth is becoming a sought after feature in environments less than tolerable to failure like automotive and medical devices.
buu700 6y ago
I think this is a pretty interesting summary: https://www.reddit.com/r/NoStupidQuestions/comments/mc13t4/comment/gs1uy39 https://www.reddit.com/r/NoStupidQuestions/comments/mc13t4/c...
jillesvangurp 6y ago
From what I know from having worked at Nokia, it's simply the result of design by committee where the committee was made up of mutually very hostile hardware (mostly) companies not particularly good at software (that's how Nokia failed in a nutshell), telcos, chipset manufacturers, hardware manufacturers, etc. And I mean hostile as in looking to squeeze each other for patent licensing, competing for the same customers, and suppliers. All this happened in an ecosystem that also produced such monstrosities as gprs, 3G, 4G, etc. Ericsson and Nokia were on top of the market when they created bluetooth and had a relatively big vote in these committees. Each of those standards were burdened with lots of little features to cater for the needs (perceived or real) of each of the committee members. It's a very similar dynamic to what happened to bluetooth. A lot of 3G stuff never really got any traction. Especially once Apple and Google decided that IP connectivity was the only thing they needed from 3G/4G modems and unceremoniously declined to even bother to support such things as videocalls over 3G. Apple did Facetime instead and in the process also strangled SMS and cut out the middlemen (operators) from the revenue. Google was a bit slower but on Android a lot of 3G features were never really implemented as they were mostly redundant if you had a working internet connection, fully featured SDKs, and a modern web browser. It's the same for a lot of early bluetooth features. Lots of stuff you can do with it; lots of vendors with half broken implementations with lots of bugs; decades of workarounds for all sorts of widely used buggy implementations; etc. It kind of works but not great and making it work great in the presence of all those not so great products is kind of hard. Just a long way of saying that bluetooth is so convoluted and complicated is because the people that built it needed it to be that way more badly than they needed for it to be easy to implement (including by others). At this point it's so entrenched that nothing else seems to be able to displace it. I'm not even sure of people actively putting time and resources in even trying to do that. I guess you could but your product just wouldn't work with any phone or laptop in the market. Which if you make e.g. headphones is kind of a non-starter. It's Bluetooth or nothing. I wouldn't be surprised if Apple considered this at some point and then ended up not doing it. They have a history of taking good ideas and then creating proprietary but functional implementations of those ideas.
- ed25519FUUU 6y ago
  > pple did Facetime instead and in the process also strangled SMS and cut out the middlemen I'm personally really glad for this decision. iMessage is many times better than SMS. SMS security is a nightmare by design. I just wish there was something better between Google and Apple, like a universal iMessage.
rrrrrrrrrrrryan 6y ago
Some of it is the constraints with the main use cases: low power, (relatively) high bandwidth, the need to pair devices without screens. Comparing this use case to something like wifi is unfair. A lot of it is due to backwards compatibility. Bluetooth isn't simply bluetooth. There are different versions, different profiles, different codecs, and even different optional features. Have a look at the matrix: https://www.rtings.com/headphones/learn/bluetooth-versions-comparison-profiles https://www.rtings.com/headphones/learn/bluetooth-versions-c... The two devices being paired have to figure out what version/profile/codec to use to talk to each other, and gracefully fall back to the lowest mutually supported featureset. This is a really hard problem, and the devices don't always handle it well.
qbasic_forever 6y ago
Enormous spec crafted by committee. It's anything and everything to everyone, which means implementing the entire thing is a _serious_ undertaking. Add to that it's the kind of feature that's a cost center--people expect wireless stuff like headphones, etc. to just work and be there, it's not a glitzy feature that sells products. So there's zero incentive to innovate or spend time and money making it better. Hardware makers want cheaper chips, skimping on the implementation and software side helps make that happen.

Mindwipe 6y ago

It's pretty simple really. It tries to do a lot of complicated things, and it's underspecified so it's possible to have compliant devices that behave wildly differently between vendors. It also rarely breaks compatibility so there's a lot of cruft for ancient devices.

jeffnappi 6y ago
This is the exact reason it is challenging. There is a lot of variance in how each manufacturer implements it. You might compare it to the browser wars of old - you've got many different players adding various extensions in different ways etc. The actual radio technology and low power consumption are phenomenal, the problems arise mostly around protocol implementation oddities.

wuuwoo 6y ago

Any analysis would be less than insightful unless it comes from someone who sat in the meetings and helped write the standard. FWIW Bluetooth isn't "terrible." It's pretty remarkable we can get all sorts of devices to communicate with eachother wirelessly and at low powers with pretty decent bandwidth. And now you can buy a Bluetooth stack on a chip from a variety of vendors. The bigger issue with Bluetooth is that failure conditions are mostly an afterthought by device manufacturers, and Bluetooth is becoming a sought after feature in environments less than tolerable to failure like automotive and medical devices.

buu700 6y ago

I think this is a pretty interesting summary: https://www.reddit.com/r/NoStupidQuestions/comments/mc13t4/comment/gs1uy39 https://www.reddit.com/r/NoStupidQuestions/comments/mc13t4/c...

jillesvangurp 6y ago

From what I know from having worked at Nokia, it's simply the result of design by committee where the committee was made up of mutually very hostile hardware (mostly) companies not particularly good at software (that's how Nokia failed in a nutshell), telcos, chipset manufacturers, hardware manufacturers, etc. And I mean hostile as in looking to squeeze each other for patent licensing, competing for the same customers, and suppliers. All this happened in an ecosystem that also produced such monstrosities as gprs, 3G, 4G, etc. Ericsson and Nokia were on top of the market when they created bluetooth and had a relatively big vote in these committees. Each of those standards were burdened with lots of little features to cater for the needs (perceived or real) of each of the committee members. It's a very similar dynamic to what happened to bluetooth. A lot of 3G stuff never really got any traction. Especially once Apple and Google decided that IP connectivity was the only thing they needed from 3G/4G modems and unceremoniously declined to even bother to support such things as videocalls over 3G. Apple did Facetime instead and in the process also strangled SMS and cut out the middlemen (operators) from the revenue. Google was a bit slower but on Android a lot of 3G features were never really implemented as they were mostly redundant if you had a working internet connection, fully featured SDKs, and a modern web browser. It's the same for a lot of early bluetooth features. Lots of stuff you can do with it; lots of vendors with half broken implementations with lots of bugs; decades of workarounds for all sorts of widely used buggy implementations; etc. It kind of works but not great and making it work great in the presence of all those not so great products is kind of hard. Just a long way of saying that bluetooth is so convoluted and complicated is because the people that built it needed it to be that way more badly than they needed for it to be easy to implement (including by others). At this point it's so entrenched that nothing else seems to be able to displace it. I'm not even sure of people actively putting time and resources in even trying to do that. I guess you could but your product just wouldn't work with any phone or laptop in the market. Which if you make e.g. headphones is kind of a non-starter. It's Bluetooth or nothing. I wouldn't be surprised if Apple considered this at some point and then ended up not doing it. They have a history of taking good ideas and then creating proprietary but functional implementations of those ideas.

ed25519FUUU 6y ago
> pple did Facetime instead and in the process also strangled SMS and cut out the middlemen I'm personally really glad for this decision. iMessage is many times better than SMS. SMS security is a nightmare by design. I just wish there was something better between Google and Apple, like a universal iMessage.

rrrrrrrrrrrryan 6y ago

Some of it is the constraints with the main use cases: low power, (relatively) high bandwidth, the need to pair devices without screens. Comparing this use case to something like wifi is unfair. A lot of it is due to backwards compatibility. Bluetooth isn't simply bluetooth. There are different versions, different profiles, different codecs, and even different optional features. Have a look at the matrix: https://www.rtings.com/headphones/learn/bluetooth-versions-comparison-profiles https://www.rtings.com/headphones/learn/bluetooth-versions-c... The two devices being paired have to figure out what version/profile/codec to use to talk to each other, and gracefully fall back to the lowest mutually supported featureset. This is a really hard problem, and the devices don't always handle it well.

qbasic_forever 6y ago

Enormous spec crafted by committee. It's anything and everything to everyone, which means implementing the entire thing is a _serious_ undertaking. Add to that it's the kind of feature that's a cost center--people expect wireless stuff like headphones, etc. to just work and be there, it's not a glitzy feature that sells products. So there's zero incentive to innovate or spend time and money making it better. Hardware makers want cheaper chips, skimping on the implementation and software side helps make that happen.