Moving from BLE to Bluetooth or ANT for high data rate

[flyforward]

I have a little bit of experience on TI BLE stack development and wanted to move to Nordic product with Bluetooth or ANT protocol for a higher data rate. I got a general question to ask.

How different is it between BLE stack and Bluetooth / ANT stack (protocol)? Do they share similar architectures of the code? Maybe this is a hard question to answer before you actually learn it:) Which protocol (Bluetooth or ANT) can give a higher data rate? I knew the BLE can only give ~5KB/s and my goal is ~1~2MB/s in the real communication (not the ideal numbers).

Thank you in advance,

[endnode]

BLE means Bluetooth Low Energy so BLE is Bluetooth, actually one of protocols inside that family under BT SIG hood. So what you have used on TI chips is pretty similar to capabilities of Nordic nRF5x products and stacks. Note that other Bluetooth protocols like "classic" aka BR/EDR are not supported by any Nordic commercial product today so if you want to talk about them this is not a good forum for you.

When it comes to ANT (and ANT+) this is protocol unrelated to Bleutooth but thanks to the same radio frequency bend can coexist with BLE stack on the same SoC. You can read about all these technologies on Wikipedia and standardization bodies like BT SIG (for Bluetooth) and ANT wireless. When it comes o throughput it's not so easy to compare because that's very depending on the application topology. BLE as it is mainly used today (not speaking about BLE mesh) is peer-to-peer technology. If this is what you want (data transport from one point to another with direct link) then BLE is what you want because with latest BT5 features you can get effective data throughput >1Mbps (surely it depends on what layer you are measuring;) - read some blog posts from Nordic. ANT/ANT+ are technologies targeting specifically fitness trackers and similar applications so they are able to work in different network topologies, however throughput won't be as high.

[Turbo J]

If you meant 1-2 MegaBytes per second: Use WLAN with 5GHz. The 2.4 GHz band is often too crowded for this kind of bandwidth.

[endnode]

(...and "the BLE can only give ~5KB/s" is false but not that it would matter in the context of this question...)

[Petter Myhre]

Maximum throughput for Bluetooth low energy is around 1350 kbps in the high speed mode.

Maximum throughput for ANT is 60 kbps with advanced burst.

[flyforward]

Thank you very much!