Bluetooth Will Always Be Unreliable

Dropped connections, stuttering audio, and perhaps the most annoying gremlin of all, attempting and failing to connect a new device a hundred times without success: For a technology that’s approaching three decades old, Bluetooth can be a massive pain. While it’s certainly improved over the years, it continues to be flaky and unreliable in a lot of (unfortunately fairly common) circumstances.

Now, you can argue that much of that unreliability isn’t really Bluetooth’s fault. It’s struggling to do a difficult job in what is an increasingly crowded environment. Controlled by a governing body called the Bluetooth Special Interest Group (SIG), Bluetooth is continually being crowded by other traffic and new technologies. 

That said, one of the main issues with Bluetooth isn’t really the SIG’s fault: It comes down to interference. Bluetooth operates on the 2.4GHz band, the same band crowded with traffic from everything from Wi-Fi to wireless devices with their own dedicated dongles, or even old polluters like microwaves. Frequency hopping, where a signal bounces around the channels within the 2.4GHz band, can help mitigate some of these problems. However, Bluetooth will always suffer from interference and packet loss.

What the Bluetooth group is more liable for is that the technology uses short-range, low-power signals. This means that everything from furniture to other human bodies can interfere with Bluetooth broadcasting, and that device placement takes on outsize importance in signal strength and reliability.

There’s also the issue that, despite it being one of the technology’s most pervasive uses, Bluetooth wasn’t originally intended for audio. Bluetooth was originally meant strictly for wireless data transfer, and later modified to create wireless personal area networks (WPANs). However, it transfers data at slower speeds compared to other protocols, like Wi-Fi (600Mbps for Wi-Fi; a mere 2Mbps for Bluetooth 5). This, in turn, means that it’s slow to self-correct if data is lost, which can lead to audio stutters or disconnects.

Another problem is version control, and how backwards compatibility works for Bluetooth. If you’re connecting your shiny new phone which supports Bluetooth 6.0 (with all its impressive enhancements) to an older pair of headphones, which only support Bluetooth 4.2, the connection will have to operate at the older 4.2 level. This means all of the advancements and improvements that have been made across hardware generations are irrelevant when using your slightly outdated device. Because the Bluetooth version is determined at the hardware level by the physical radio chipset, you generally can’t update an older device’s version.

Unfortunately, those issues are just the tip of the iceberg. There are also profile versions to consider. Profiles tell devices what kind of data they’ll be exchanging, and makes adjustments accordingly. The idea is that individual connections between different kinds of devices will be optimized. The reality, however, is that there are a dizzying array of profiles, many of them haven’t been updated in years, and lots of devices don’t support the best and latest profiles. 

This is why you might be listening to music on earbuds via your phone, and the sound quality will be absolutely banging; but when you answer a call from your mom, she sounds like she’s reaching you from a submarine in the depths of the Atlantic. Because which profiles a device supports is also often encoded at the hardware level, if your earbuds from a few years back don’t support a new headset profile, you’ll likely never be able to improve audio quality on calls when using them.

So what can you do on your end to fix Bluetooth issues? While versions and profiles are often locked to hardware, you can sometimes see improvements by updating your device’s software, firmware, or drivers. You can also cheat the system somewhat by pairing devices from the same provider. Apple, for instance, makes use of some proprietary Bluetooth tech to ensure that its devices almost always pair and play well together. Checking your device’s Bluetooth hardware version and supported profiles can also keep you ahead of the curve. That said, you’d be forgiven if you don’t want to wade through the dozens of profiles to make sure all of your use cases are supported by all your devices.