The Bluetooth 4.0 standard brought a few major changes for this technology back when the overhaul arrived in 2010, that helped increase Bluetooth’s popularity and enabled solutions that were previously not possible. Bluetooth is now due for another update and the next one, expected in 2016, is going to bring more speed and range to a technology that can certainly use both of those advantages.
Bluetooth Special Interest Group has laid down its plans for the future of Bluetooth and the plans are very nice indeed. It plans to improve the speed by 100% without increasing the energy consumption aside from increasing the range of Bluetooth Smart by up to four times.
The plan also aims to introduce mesh networking to Bluetooth which will enable multiple devices to use this wireless standard to create networks that serve more decides and aren’t limited to one-to-one links. All of these improvements will certainly go a long way to ensure that Bluetooth is ready for everything that the future holds, but making all of these changes is easier said than done.
All of these ideas live in the Bluetooth Special Interest Group’s plan, and while the timeline is 2016, one must consider the fact that it’s possible for these features to take even more time to arrive on commercially available products because development can often require additional time.
Nevertheless than plan for improving this wireless standard is good enough and when it is implemented, Bluetooth will be much faster and stronger than ever before.