Bluetooth 5 was announced by the Bluetooth SIG on June 16, 2016 to be arriving in late 2016, and it was finally officially unveiled on December 7, 2016. As per the initial advertisement, it was announced to have "Quadruple the range of its predecessor, double the speed, and 8 times the broadcasting capacity," for low energy connections.
Let's examine each of the factors one by one so that we can understand the practical implications of each of them.
Currently, Bluetooth Low Energy (4.2) offers advertising packet sizes of 31 bytes and BLE 5 allows this to increase by a factor of eight, that is, the broadcasting capacity of a BLE 5 device would be 255 bytes.
To understand this better, let's perform a small experiment. In Chapter 5, Beacons with Raspberry Pi, we configured our Raspberry Pi to broadcast a URL as an Eddystone Beacon. We shall repeat the same experiment here, however, with a little twist.
In terms of the setup, this time, instead of the...