Is this the current state of support for Bluetooth 5?

[greyed]

I’ve been working in a small group to use the advertising extensions in BT5 to send 12 hours of temperature measurements in one advertising packets. We’ve been developing with the nRF2840 PDK, and trying loads of SDK and softdevice combinations. The nRF2840 is advertised on the NordicSemi homepage to fully support BT5 features, and soft device S140-SD-v6 also claims ‘Support for Bluetooth 5’ in its first release. So the advertising extensions should surely be supported?

The latest release, 6.0.0-6.alpha contains mentions of advertising extensions in the header files, and updates many of the structures associated with it. Working from the beacon example within the release, it should be possible to implement the advertising extensions, but we have had no luck. Sadly, this is made very difficult by the absence of the documentation for this release on the infocenter.

Although all signs point to the support of this feature, there is contrary information from Nordic on the devzone (devzone.nordicsemi.com/.../. It seems that although the features are ‘supported’, they are in fact not ‘supported’. Perhaps someone could clear this up for us?

[ovrebekk]

Hi

An aspect that catch many people of guard when it comes to Bluetooth 5 is the fact that all the cool new features are optional ;)
This includes the high speed and long range modes, and the advertising extension feature.

In other words you don't have to support any of these features to be BT5 compliant.

The S140-SD-v6 supports the high speed and long range modes, but the advertising extension support is very limited.
We added support for advertising in the long range mode, which is necessary to allow you to connect to a device over long range, but we don't support larger packets, or more advanced features such as periodic advertising or chained advertisement packets.

Best regards
Torbjørn

[awneil]

So your blog is lying when it says,

"we at Nordic do not take that approach"

https://devzone.nordicsemi.com/b/blog/posts/taking-a-deeper-dive-into-bluetooth-5

[ovrebekk]

Hi Andrew

The approach we refer to is implementing the minimal errata fixes required for BT 5 compliance, without adding any of the new features:
"Bluetooth devices are fit for declaration of readiness for a Bluetooth specification by ensuring it fulfills the associated errata for that specification."

While the adoption of new features is taking more time than we would like, and it would be nice to have support for all the features introduced by BT 5, it is not a lie to say that we have added various new BT 5 features in all our BT 5 compliant SoftDevices. 

We also try to be open about which features are supported or not in any SoftDevice we release, and avoid giving the impression that BT 5 compliance means 100% coverage of BT 5 features. 

Best regards
Torbjørn