What should you know about the Bluetooth range?

How far does Bluetooth usually reach? Commercial electronics, including most smartphones, headphones, earbuds, and portable speakers, fall into class 2, which gives them a range of about 33 feet . Bluetooth 5.0 and above strengthen range and quality.

What is the maximum range of a Bluetooth signal?

It supports approximately 300 feet (100 meters) of communicable distance. However, the most potent Bluetooth radios can transmit more than 10 times that distance outdoors. Class 1 Bluetooth radios are for industrial applications and not used for consumer products.

How do I maximize my Bluetooth range?

Fortunately, there are several ways to increase the range of Bluetooth, including keeping your devices up to date, reducing interference, using an external Bluetooth antenna, using a Bluetooth range extender, using a Bluetooth amplifier, and keeping your devices cool .

How to check Bluetooth range?

Simply Option (Alt) click the Bluetooth menu bar item, then move the mouse cursor over the Bluetooth item you want to check the signal strength for and look for "RSSI" . The two most likely reasons for a bad Bluetooth connection are low batteries and heavy interference from something in the environment.

Why is my Bluetooth range so short?

There is an obstacle, such as metal or wall, between the headset and the BLUETOOTH device . A device using 2.4 GHz frequency, such as a Wi-Fi device, cordless telephone, or microwave oven, is in use near this headset.

Can Bluetooth go through walls?

Bluetooth works flawlessly when there's nothing to impede it's path. But when the signal needs to pass through heavy building materials and multiple walls, the effectiveness of the signal could be impacted. Bluetooth is more likely to travel through drywall than concrete or metal , for example.

Does Bluetooth require line of sight?

Because Bluetooth uses radio waves, Bluetooth devices can communicate with each other without line-of-sight . The Bluetooth standard is part of the IEEE 802.15 family of standards for wireless personal area networks (PANs).

What frequency range is Bluetooth?

Bluetooth ® technology uses the 2.4 GHz ISM spectrum band ( 2400 to 2483.5 MHz) , which enables a good balance between range and throughput.

Why is my Bluetooth out of range?

Check the Bluetooth range. In order to connect, most Bluetooth devices need to be within 30 feet of the phone or tablet. Make sure the devices are close enough ; otherwise, they will not connect.

What is long range Bluetooth?

What is Bluetooth long-range mode? Bluetooth long-range (also known as Coded PHY) is a new mode introduced in Bluetooth Version 5.0 to extend the range of Bluetooth devices from 30-100 feet to ranges of 1 kilometer and beyond .

How far can Bluetooth 5.0 reach?

Longer range: Bluetooth 4.2 can hold connection to another device for a maximum of 60 meters (200 feet). With Bluetooth 5.0, that distance is quadrupled to 240 meters (800 feet) .

What is Bluetooth range distance?

The effective, reliable range between Bluetooth devices is anywhere from more than a kilometer down to less than a meter .

Things You Should Know About Bluetooth Range (2024)

Like all communication technologies, Bluetooth is a betterfit for some applications than others. If you'reconsideringusing Bluetooth, here’s an outline of the primary factors that determine the effective range of Bluetooth communications, plus some ways to improve it with networking. This article is now updated with the addition of Bluetooth 5 performance.

The complete guide to Bluetooth Low Energy

Bluetooth Classic vs. Bluetooth Low Energy

Bluetooth was originally designed to exchange a lot of data at close range in continuous, streaming data applications. The devices are able to both send and receive data at the same time. This is perfect for many common consumer products, such as computer headsets, where the two devices are close together.

When Bluetooth LE (formerly called Bluetooth Smart) hit the marketin 2011, the key advantage over earlier versions was lower power consumption over the same range, but with lower bandwidth. It’s intended for devices that only need to exchange small amounts of data periodically, extending battery life by months or even years.

Bluetooth range compared

	BLUETOOTH v2.1	BLUETOOTH 4.0 (LE)	BLUETOOTH 5 (LE)
Range	Up to 100 m	Up to 100 m	Up to 400 m
Max range (free field)	Around 100 m (class 2 outdoors)	Around 100 m (outdoors)	Around 1,000m (outdoors)
Frequency	2.402 – 2.481 GHz	2.402 – 2.481 GHz	2.402 - 2.481 GHz
Max data rate	1- 3 Mbit/s	1 Mbit/s	2 Mbit/s
Application Troughput	0.7-2.1 Mbit/s	Up to 305 kbit/s	Up to 1,360 kbit/s
Topologies	Point-to-point, scatternet	Point-to-point, mesh network	Point-to-point, mesh network
Network Standard	IEEE 802.15.1	IEEE 802.15.1	IEEE 802.15.1

Range depends on surroundings, radio performance and antennas

There are many factors affecting Bluetooth range, typically:

The output power of the transmitter
The sensitivity of the receiver
Physical obstacles in the transmission path
The antennas

While the radio performance and antennas are pretty static for a given Bluetooth device, the surroundings can vary a lot. Outdoors, in an open field, you can get a range of up to a hundred meters. But that is a rare situation. Indoors, obstacles like concrete walls will attenuate the radio signal and the effective range will be drastically reduced. In normal use, ten meters is a good guide to what can be achieved between two Bluetooth devices indoors.

When developing a Bluetooth device, you can give your device a better range by selecting the Bluetooth chip with the best receiver sensitivity and output power, and making sure that you use a good antenna.

Sometimes you may need to use Bluetooth over hundreds or thousands of meters. In the next section we will discuss how to extend Bluetooth range using networks.

Typical use of Bluetooth and Bluetooth LE

Bluetooth v2.1	Wireless headsets File transfer between devices Wireless printers Wireless speakers
Bluetooth LE	Medical devices for monitoring and reporting Sports and fitness devices Industrial monitoring sensors Home automation Geo-based, targeted promotions via beacons Public transportation apps Remote controls PC peripheral devices like wireless mouse and keyboard

Bluetooth 5 enhancements

Version 5 of the Bluetooth specification brought with it a number of improvements, all aimed at making the low energy part of Bluetooth more flexible:

2Mbps ‘high speed’ mode, allowing you to increase the data rate or reduce the average current consumption, at the cost of a small range reduction
125kbs or 500kbps ‘long range’ mode, allowing you to increase range at the cost of reduced data rate and increased average current consumption
Advertising extension feature, allowing up to 8 times the data throughput in broadcasting applications (like beacons)
Maximum output power increased from +10 dBm to +20 dBm, allowing more powerful power amplifiers to be used, boosting range further
New channel selection policy added (CSA2), making it possible for more devices to co-exist in the same environment without interfering with each other
Read more: The Bluetooth 5 trade-off

How to improve Bluetooth range with networking

You can connect Bluetooth devices to multiple distributed gateways connected to the internet. The Bluetooth devices can communicate with each other, and with online services, via these gateways.

This is an ideal solution if the devices are spread over a large geographical area. Each hub can usually only handle a few directly connected devices, which is another limitation of Bluetooth. You arelikely torun into a situation where you want to handle hundreds or even thousands of Bluetooth devices in a relatively small area, such as an office building. For this you need to use a Mesh Network to connect the gateway and the local Bluetooth devices.

Read also: What is PAN, BAN, WAN and LPWAN [Infographic]

The power of mesh networks

The number of devices that require low-power operation and communication with other devices - and online services - is growing daily. In order to support this, Bluetooth LE introduced support for Mesh Networks.

A Mesh Network allows you to connect a large number of Bluetooth devices over a wider area. In this situation, all devices, or “nodes”, in the same mesh are able to communicate with each other, either directly or via one or more intermediate nodes, as long as each node is close enough to at least two others.

This way, the network does not depend on a central gateway to pass all traffic.

Just like the Internet, data packets can find the most efficient route via any nodes between the sender and the receiver.

In a Mesh Network you can also use a “broadcasting” approach, where all nodes within the Mesh Network receive the same message, and then interpret it and take appropriate action.

Read more: Mesh networks explained

One example could be a smart lighting system. Each switch or bulb is a node on a Mesh Network using Bluetooth LE. Each bulb is configured to know which room it’s in.

The message is broadcast from Node 1, a light switch, via the mesh. The connected light bulbs in Room 1 receive this message, but they will not act upon it, as they know they are not in Room 2. The message is passed along and when it reaches the bulbs in Room 2, they turn on. Room 2 could be hundreds of meters away from Room 1, but will still receive the message via the other nodes in between. This way there could be a thousand or more rooms, all with lighting controlled from anywhere, using a Bluetooth LE network.

Read more: What is HomeKit?

First published in June 2016
Updated Jan 25, 2023