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Wi-Fi 7 quietly took off while everyone was looking at AI
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this post was submitted on 12 Jan 2024
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And it's always been terrible at it. And it still is. Pairing issues, overcompressed audio, dropping connections, overcomplicated protocol without universal support... I have no idea how it didn't get replaced by a competing standard.
Like Wi-Fi, honestly. How is Bluetooth not just "USB over Wi-Fi". Literally. Tunnel USB over a 2.4Ghz link. A transport layer that does transport, and then the endpoints can just... Talk to each other. It doesn't sound hard..
Instead we have a system where my wireless controller works great except with an Intel built-in BT chipset. So when I decided to play some games last night on my new TV and tried it out with my laptop, every 15 minutes or so the controller locks up and spins constantly to the right, and has to be re-paired.
Or where if I play anything with any sort of bass in my truck the compressor flattens the mids so you can't even hear the vocals, so I have to use a physical aux cord instead. Why is there dynamic range compression at all? Why is it not configurable? Why is this not just a raw PCM stream. WHY
We have had this protocol for 25 YEARS and it still works like beta
Bluetooth was designed to be low power peer to peer where WiFi was designed for highest legal power allowed and all devices connect via a router to handle the harder stuff. All Bluetooth problems stem from that design constraint.
Passwords? Bluetooth has to work without authentication to your router.
Raw pcm? Bluetooth needs low power which means low bandwidth which means no raw pcm (until recently). To get audio over the low bandwidth with low latency they had to use worse codecs than aac.
Check which codecs your phone supports and buy a Bluetooth dongle that supports an HD audio codec. LDAC and APT-X HD are almost indistinguishable from an aux cable.
But yes, even those codecs max out at a pathetic 900kbs, and only have a few feet of range at that quality/speed.
I don't have those problems with my bluetooth devices nearly as much anymore. The exception being in my car where it's absolute crap. I blame that mostly on car companies because they are notoriously slow at adopting new technology and/or updating their existing tech.
I'm not an expert with bluetooth or anything, but my understanding was that if the source/destination both supported the codec then there wasn't any compression from bluetooth. Could be wrong about that, but that does seem to be the case in my very limited testing. Not sure why your car/phone pairing is crap but most likely it's that your car bluetooth is a bit shitty.
I think you might be omitting a few important features of bluetooth over wifi. The really big advantage to bluetooth is that it is that it is low power. You wouldn't be able to run your earbuds for several hours on a tiny battery if it was running wifi compared to bluetooth. The low power feature is great for portable speakers too. It's also more user friendly then setting/connecting wifi, but I'm not sure if that matters as much anymore.
I like Bluetooth quite a lot, but the default SBC codec that comes with A2DP isn't all that great. Even FLAK gets recompressed in an obscure format at medium bitrate.
HD "standards" like... AptX(?) aren't really a Bluetooth standard AFAIK but it runs over Bluetooth so if both devices support it, it works great.
Fun fact, them HD standards are so software based that I got support for three different HD standards when I changed OS.