Why can’t my phone connect to all my Bluetooth devices at once?
In: Technology
A bluetooth antenna has a limit of how many devices can be connected at once, and has to share it’s available bandwidth between all of those devices.
The upper limit if often 7, but for some phones it will be less.
Bluetooth is actually a very VERY old protocol that predates smartphones by over a decade. It was used because it was available and well understood, but it’s long overdue to be replaced with something better.
I think because of the exact same reason if you use 5 computers at the same time updating call of duty with the same router your internet will turn to shit, bandwidth
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older android (pre android11 or so) phones had a bug that prevented communicating with more than 10 paired devices at once (LE). many bluetooth designs are point to point, so they do not support connecting to multiple at once. multimedia support on Bluetooth only supports one or two simultaneous connections. if it is an LE device, your phone can connect to all of your devices at once, an example: apple airtags, they may not even be yours, but yours and everyone’s phones are connecting to them all the time if they are in range.
Bluetooth was designed as a low power connection. It maxes out around 1Mbps compared to WiFi at 600Mbps or more. Audio streams are roughly 300Kbps, so at most you can have two or three streams at a time.
Audio, unlike most data, is time sensitive so even short hiccups will make it sound terrible.
It might be possible to use multicast to broadcast a single stream to multiple devices, but it doesn’t seem to be used much.
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