Why do you falsely advertise Bluetooth 5 support, when it really is only Bluetooth Low Energy Support?

[Peter]

Many of your descriptions of your product keep talking about Bluetooth 5 support. 

For example: https://www.nordicsemi.com/Products/Low-power-short-range-wireless/Bluetooth-5

There are other examples, such as the product brief: https://www.nordicsemi.com/-/media/Software-and-other-downloads/Product-Briefs/nRF52832-product-brief.pdf?la=en&hash=2F9D995F754BA2F2EA944A2C4351E682AB7CB0B9

This is misleading and is false-advertising since Bluetooth 5 includes Bluetooth Low-Energy and other non Low-energy profiles, yet your chip only support BLE. 

I blame the Bluetooth organization itself for making Bluetooth 5 and BLE very confusing to separate and understand, but if you dig enough, you'll see that there is still support for classic bluetooth protocols in Bluetooth 5, which your chips don't support. I know your engineers understand this from the answers on the DevZone you provide. The question is why your marketing team didn't get the memo?

Correct me if I'm wrong, but wouldn't you consider this a bit misleading. Is there some reason for this?

[haakonsh]

Hey Peter,

tldr; A device that is qualified with BlueTooth SIG for BT 5.0 compliance does not need to fully comply with the entire 5.0 specification. 


Since the release of the Bluetooth 4.0 specification, it has covered two mutually exclusive radio protocols, Enhanced Data Rate and Low Energy, that have but a few features in common. 
Either protocol can be qualified for Bluetooth 4.0, or later, spec compliance without supporting the other protocol. This has been the case since 2010. 

Nowhere in any of our advertising material is any reference to any EDR feature.
If you search our DevZone for EDR you will find numerous numbers of posts explicitly discussing the lack of EDR support in our products. 

I do agree that BT SIG's advertising guidelines create a bit of confusion from time to time, and that's something that you should communicate with them about. No change will occur without input. 

Best regards,
Håkon.

[Peter]

Here's my short answer.

No one said you needed to support both EDR and BLE, but that doesn't mean you have to be ambiguous about which ones you support by throwing around the Bluetooth 5 term. You should explicitly say it is ONLY supporting Low-Energy spec. 

Bluetooth 5 is a term that on its own implies full Bluetooth support, unless you explicitly say Low-energy support only. You don't need to exacerbate the confusion already created by the Bluetooth community. 

[haakonsh]

What you're describing is the actual marketing strategy from BT SIG that every vendor in the BLE market follows. If you look at Dialog, TI, Cypress, or CSR, you will find the same state. 

Peter said:

Bluetooth 5 is a term that on its own implies full Bluetooth support, unless you explicitly say Low-energy support only.

No, it does not imply support for every feature of the BT 5.0 specification. Rather, it implies compliance with the necessary BT SIG's criteria to be fully 5.0 compliant. 

If you think anyone has violated the Bluetooth marketing guidelines you should report them to the BT SIG as they are not keen on having "rouge" members, and will crack down on such behavior. See https://www.bluetooth.com/develop-with-bluetooth/marketing-branding/brand-enforcement-program/