What will the range be with a ble 5 server, but iphone with Bluetooth 4

[Renix]

If I used a nrf52840 bluetooth5 as a server, but customers have iPhones with Bluetooth 4.x on, will the range still be 2x or 4x, as stated by BT SIG?

Did Nordic test the range with Bluetooth 4.x phone?

I do not have a nrf52840 board yet.

I currently have 132 10040 nrf5283 device on my board, but the distance / range is not enough for the application. So I thought perhaps BLE5 will do the trick?

Any advise appreciated

[endnode]

Hi,

I guess no phone today supports BT 5.x "Long Range" data rates (500/125kbps), certainly not iPhones currently in the field. To be honest this BT 5 feature doesn't look like anything desperately needed on the phones (= you want to create local connection with your gadgets, car etc., certainly not to communicate on hundreds or thousands of meters) so it wouldn't be surprising if there would be no phones/tablets at all equipped with this feature in the future (remember that many features in BT SIG specifications are optional so you don't need to support everything to have sticker "compliant with BT5"). If you have issues with the range I'm afraid BT5 won't help you (nor today neither any time soon), only better antenna tuning, chip sensitivity or totally changing architecture (e.g. is BLE really right solution?).

[Daniel Wang]

Well, Samsung Galaxy S8 will be the first phone that support Bluetooth 5.0. According to several tech-magazines and websites it will support the Long Range feature, but I haven't seen any thing official from Samsung on this yet.

[endnode]

Yes, SGS8 should be BT5.0, but the "long range" support is all just fabricated by journalists who see "BT5.0" on the box and "BT 5.0 brings high speed and long range" headlines few months back so they think they understand it, 1+1=3 and hooray, let's write it on the internet. At least this is what I read from Verge article and others. But of course I might be terribly wrong.

[Renix]

Hi endnode, I just need to get from inside the house to anywhere in the backyard.

Now, I lose the connection as soon as I walk in the backdoor.

Perhaps BT classic would be the way to go, but I have invested so much effort into BLE so far.

It will be really painful to go through this again switching to BR/EDR

Regards

[endnode]

I see (and share your disappointment, working on similar topology where I expect to be able to cover a "average" house with BLE without such issues). Have you tried to play with Tx Power on nRF5x side? Can you debug it on nRF5x side and confirm what are RSSI values seen when iPhone approaches the edge of reliable zone? Can you run some sniffer at close proximity of the phone and see if it sees just half of connection events from certain moment (suggesting Tx power/antenna performance/Rx sensitivity issues on either side)? I'm afraid that the only advantage of switching to BR/EDR would be higher transmit power allowed (if I'm not mistaken) but who would like to learn completely different network stack, chip, APIs...

[endnode]

Btw. if you have two nRF5x boards (whatever variant and PCB type) I would suggest to set-up DTM test examples (as per nRF5 SDK) and run it on max Tx power (+4dBm). If you place devices to desired distance you could get from results (PER) some feeling where are real limits of the chip, if it has rather Tx issues or Rx. Of course iPhone will be always black-box in your game but still you have one side to optimize so I would try to find out if it's possible.