I had this thought just now at the gym. I noticed multiple people, myself included, using wireless earbuds during our workouts – specifically AirPods.
My question is, if multiple people are using AirPods that work on the same frequency/signal, how come our music doesn’t all interfere with each other? How do each of our phones/AirPods differentiate from the others a few feet away from me?
In: Engineering
The frequency band for consumer electronics is fairly large, and as we’ve made better antennas, we can distinguish signals in smaller and smaller segments of it. That means we can have many many devices operating near each other that are all on slightly different ranges in that large band.
Beyond that, the communication protocols do have systems in place to do random backoff and repeat when they detect interference. That’s why bluetooth audio has a latency to it — it needs a buffer for when that interference does happen.
Latest Answers