Bluetooth, developed by Ericsson and named for a Danish Warlord, has become a part of almost every wireless device. Originally, Ericsson determined it could not successfully introduce Bluetooth on its own so a deal was worked out with Intel and the first U.S. demonstration took place on December 7, 1999. I attended this demonstration and predicted Bluetooth would be a success. The interesting aftermath was that Intel decided Bluetooth would not be a significant new source of revenue and basically gave the technology to the industry. Today, Bluetooth is overseen by an industry organization with a huge number of member companies, all of which contribute to revisions of the technology.
The premise then and now is for Bluetooth to be a short-range audio connection between devices. Most of us use Bluetooth today with Bluetooth ear buds, Bluetooth speakers within 100-150 feet of an audio source, and much more. Bluetooth also found its way into public-safety communications and today it is built into many Land Mobile Radio (LMR) and FirstNet (LTE) devices. Motorola employs Bluetooth to provide connections between its APX portable radios and LEX LTE device to enable a single device to control both the APX and LEX via a Bluetooth connection.
Enter Bluetooth 5.0
There have been a number of major upgrades since the introduction of Bluetooth. The latest and perhaps most relevant to the public-safety community was the Bluetooth organization’s release of Bluetooth 5.0 in 2016. Bluetooth 5.0 contains a number of revisions that are well-suited for the public-safety communications market. First, the range of a 5.0 device is said to be up to 800 feet, compared to 150 feet for earlier versions. Bluetooth 5.0 can also be used in a mesh network, which is described as:
“A mesh network (or simply meshnet) is a local network topology in which the infrastructure nodes (i.e. bridges, switches, and other infrastructure devices) connect directly, dynamically and non-hierarchically to as many other nodes as possible and cooperate with one another to efficiently route data from/to clients.” Mesh networks are self-creating and self-healing which means that as nodes are added or lost, the network reconfigures itself and continues to operate. This is of value mostly in the Internet of Things (IoT) world of public safety devices but could play different and interesting rolls going forward.”
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