Why should you care about the continual engineering of Bluetooth? Because it could be helping your automated factory very soon. Bluetooth is about to have twice the speed it previously did and it will also have four times the range. They’re calling it Bluetooth 5. The announcement comes from the Bluetooth Special Interest Group. The group says that the new iteration of the technology would assist in accelerating “industries such as industrial automation, smart infrastructure, smart homes and location-based services.”
Mark Powell, Bluetooth SIG executive director, said: “By adding significantly more capacity to advertising transmissions, Bluetooth 5 will further propel the adoption and deployment of beacons and location-based services to users around the world. It’s a great story and one we’re looking forward to telling from our upcoming media event in London on June 16.”
The group is confident that Bluetooth will factor into the Internet of Things in a big way. Bluetooth wireless technologies are reportedly already being used as a preference of communication between sensors in some factories. A group named IMS Research published a report that revealed Bluetooth technology accounted for “more than half of all wireless-enabled industrial automation equipment shipped in 2012.” The report concluded that 22 percent of the market used Bluetooth technologies and 31 percent used WLAN solutions. Now, with the advancement of Bluetooth, the number of automated industrial complexes using the technology could grow.
Information Week reports that 3 billion devices sent out per year have the Bluetooth technology built into them.