Why is Bluetooth so much flakier than USB, WiFi, etc?

502 views

For ~20 years now, basic USB and WiFi connection have been in the category of “mostly expected to work” – you do encounter incompatibilities but it tends to be unusual.

Bluetooth, on the other hand, seems to have been “expected to fail or at least be flaky as hell” since Day 1, and it doesn’t seem to have gotten better over time. What makes the Bluetooth stack/protocol so much more apparently-unstable than other protocols?

In: 7688

18 Answers

Anonymous 0 Comments

Many reasons: GFSK, low power, overly complicated stack. But honestly, the software is worse than the hardware though. And it’s all block boxes, so you can’t blame the developers, they are flying blind. The litigious Bluetooth SIG deserves most of the blame. If there were an open source alternative, it would probably be 200% better.

You are viewing 1 out of 18 answers, click here to view all answers.