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There's a long list of comments in that thread discussing "why" it's the case, with most simply saying "it's difficult." I disagree.

I think it's the same reason why so much of our software is poor quality: taking something from "works" to "works well" is a cost sink. It will cost you and yet doesn't add much to the bottom line to compensate.

It's sad that my family uses the available Bluetooth devices less than if there was a wire we could just plug into.

We think of technical innovation as a straight line forward but sometimes it goes back the other way.

4 comments

> It's sad that my family uses the available Bluetooth devices less than if there was a wire we could just plug into.

I specifically buy wired gaming headphones, wired mice and wired keyboards - if there is any sensible wired option I'll take it every time, I even have an extra long network cable I can throw across the living room for the laptop.

Wireless stuff is just less reliable and always seems to throw issues when you really need it to work.

This reminds me when our president (France) announced the quarantine and schools shutdown.

While my children were yelling their joy (we could hear all children in the neighborhood), I sat at Amazon to order three 20 m ethernet cables. They were part of our home decoration for a year and a half, laying across the house to reliably connect to the switch and fiber.

I make an exception for ear buds, because the utility of being able to stand up, and walk around with my hands free and unencumbered by a tether while on a call, is just so great. It helps that Air Pods are among the best implementation there is, but even they are not perfect. I had to disable automatic device switching or they would occasionally get confused and drop the connection to the current device.

I actually have to use wired ear buds with my gaming laptop since I found wireless interferes with also using a wireless Xbox controller.

i just thread the wire under my shirt, it's pretty similar and you can take the earbuds off and they just hang there

That's kind of OK if you're connecting to a mobile device in your pocket, but there are lots of things I use headphones with. I might be connected to my phone, I might be connected to my laptop, I might be connected to my desktop. Maybe my phone is in my pocket, maybe its on the desk, maybe its on my coffee table across the room.

My wireless headphones work all throughout the house without having to have a device physically on me. I can be listening to a call on my computer, get up and walk to the kitchen, make a snack, and walk back to my office and never miss a beat.

When I am on a videocall with my coworkers and want to fill my glass with water, I like being able to go to the kitchen without having to undock and drag my laptop all over the house.

Same if I need to find something in a shelf.

That is pretty much the only reason I use bt headset.

I'm surprised your bluetooth headphones don't just cut out when you do that. My experience is blutooth has a range of like 30 feet and that quickly diminishes when you introduce walls into the equation.

It really varies based on the equipment in question and the environment they exist in. At home, my headphones paired to my laptop will give me range almost all around the house. Paired to my desktop in the same room, it starts dropping just outside my office. Paired with my phone, I get somewhere in between. With my laptop and phone in an RF-noisy environment, it might only go 20 or 30 feet. With my motorcycle helmet to my phone, it won't even make it if my phone is on a case on the opposite side of the bike, but I think that's mostly because there's almost no chance of direct line of sight without my body and motorcycle in the way and there's no good reflections when out on the open road.

I had to convert that, and I'm shocked. One of your devices is surely faulty. My Airpods Pro with pretty much any device I connect them to, I can easily get 150m (500ft) LoS, and easily 50-100m (150-300ft) with walls in a normal building, with no quality loss at all.

My bluetooth are ok until I reach the kitchen table and fridge because they are close to the door. It starts doing robot voices and cutting out a few step further.

One of my favorite wireless devices is a Logitech gaming mouse (G903) that I use with a mousepad that is also a charging mat. It uses a low-latency proprietary wireless protocol: https://www.logitechg.com/en-us/innovation/lightspeed.html

Logitech's silly little plug-in receivers seem to be weirdly better than bluetooth, and they have been for as long as I remember. I don't really get why. If they have some magic technology in there, how has the Bluetooth SIG not managed to copy it?

The magic technology is that it's not following the bluetooth spec. It's a custom spec that works remarkably well, because it's reasonably scoped and not written by a multi-corporation-for-profit SIG.

Their dongles for wireless audio work like magic too - as close to zero latency as I've found in wireless computer headphones.

You are telling me that a single purpose spec/software/hardware stack works better than a complicated multi use case/OS/hardware standard? Call me shocked.

My cordless phone in the 90s dropped less calls than my cell phone today, how have cell phone companies not managed to copy it?

My understanding is that one of BT's big problems is that it's underspecified, so every implementation is slightly incompatible. Only having to deal with one implementation is therefore probably enough magic, but the BT SIG can't just copy it without changing the spec.

> I even have an extra long network cable I can throw across the living room for the laptop

This seems unnecessary unless you have high latency requirements, like for FPS or fighter gaming, but even then WiFi (and network coding for these games) has gotten so good that lag is barely noticeable anyway.

I say this as someone who has my desk hardwired with an unmanaged switch because it seems silly to not take the time to hardwire a stationary PC and the place where I spend the majority of my time working: if I go downstairs with my work laptop then I'm going going to drape an ethernet cable across my living room just so my connection is 1 Gbps still instead of 400+ Mbps.

To be a bit pedantic, lag and throughput aren't the main bugbears for wireless anymore, it's stability. If you live or work in a reasonably populated area, there is often enough Wi-Fi pollution around to make things like gaming or video calls painful. Sure, you'll get around 20 ms to the AP most of the time, the problem is it will occasionally spike to 200 or 2000 for a moment and there's very little you can do about it.

100% - it's these occasional spikes which honk everything up. Google meets immediately assumes your internet is crap and degrades the client, you become a robot to your listeners, and recovery takes noticeably longer than the few hundred MS it occurred in.

> Sure, you'll get around 20 ms to the AP most of the time

If you're getting 20ms to your AP you're in a pretty poor environment or you need to upgrade away from 802.11b.

While on a video call on my laptop just now, while my home theater receiver is streaming internet radio over WiFi, while I've got a dozen other devices active on my WiFi, my average latency to my router is ~1ms. Running a speed test on my phone pushing pulling >500Mbit, my latency spiked...to 12ms!

Just like with the rest of this discussion about Bluetooth being bad, if you've got poor equipment and a poor environment you're gonna have a bad time. I have some cheap USB WiFi adapters which are terrible and struggle to get good performance. I don't use those except for temporary things or when I just don't care about network performance. I don't have issues with the Intel WiFi chips on my desktop or laptops or my Ubiquiti APs.

Thank you. My ping to my router from everywhere in my house on WiFi (even my roof, 3 story row house with an AP on each floor) is 5 ms. So stupid to run wire across a living room when you could just have decent networking equipment.

20ms to your router? That's horrendous.

I live in a city. Opening my wifi menu on my MBP, I see dozens of networks. I've never really experienced any spikes like you mentioned every with gaming or video calls.

It probably heavily depends on your networking equipment. Most modern APs should have interference detection, MIMO, beamforming, variable channel width, etc., but if you're on 2.4GHz in a crowded building with thin walls I'd imagine things could get pretty hairy. Even in ideal conditions, wireless will have far more dropped packets, transport overhead, power draw, etc.

> if I go downstairs with my work laptop then I'm going going to drape an ethernet cable across my living room just so my connection is 1 Gbps still instead of 400+ Mbps

Are you missing the word "not" in there somewhere? Or being really obtuse? Your comment makes little sense as is. Initially you encourage hard wired unmoving appliances, but then also get behind draping a cable across a room to make sure movable appliances also get the best possible bandwidth?

Nah, you're right. I missed a "not" and added an extra "going".

We specifically got a printer that only can connect via a USB cable and it's been perfect.

But that's not the answer. Why? It's not that much data. WiFi doesn't seem to have some of these problems. Why is Bluetooth so shit?

Because WiFi is only trying to fix one problem: connect your device to a local network. Bluetooth has hundreds of different use-cases.

>Bluetooth has hundreds of different use-cases.

That is probably true but part of the problem is that, as I recall from years of Intel Developer Forums, Bluetooth was originally focused on mobile headsets and there were a bunch of other wireless technologies floating around for other purposes.

However, for whatever historical reasons, Bluetooth through a number of iterations pretty much ended up gobbling up all the non-WiFi wireless use cases (other than cellular and NFC of course). And it arguably wasn't really suited for a lot of them.

I agree 99% - the exception being the mouse. Since it is meant to be moved around, any obstacle (such as cable) really changes how it handles. I didn't believe it until I went to wireless and then (for a short time) back.

Otherwise agree for keyboard, network, headphones,... Wires work.

Well, head moves quite a lot as well. Out of all wireless things, the headphones have been the biggest revolution for me.

That's been the biggest step back for me. I have plenty of wire length on my headphones, never felt like I couldn't turn my head or was in any way hindered. Having to keep them charged up and buy replacement batteries every few years seems a lot more annoying.

My experience is that better quality Bluetooth headsets can handle being paired to multiple devices, cheaper ones will drive you crazy. I have these on my head right now at the office

https://www.v-moda.com/us/en/products/crossfade2-wireless

and I have a pair of these at home

https://www.poly.com/us/en/products/headsets/voyager/voyager...

I wound up getting these after having been deeply dissatisfied with Bluetooth headphones and I think they've been a very good investment.

My current complaining is about the host devices.

My work laptop is a thin Dell Latitude, the performance of Bluetooth is great on that, in a metal frame office building I am able to listen to audio in the bathroom a considerable distance from my office. My personal computer is a huge Alienware (also Dell). Bluetooth is OK when I am sitting directly in front of it but if I go to the next room it only works if I am careful to tilt my head the right way. I think it's a poor radio and/or a badly designed antenna.

Apple devices on the other hand seem to refuse to play music over WiFi with Bluetooth. Most people don't seem aware of this because they use iPhones with cellular connections but I can't do it with my iPad and we always have visitors to our cell phone dead spot (most of upstate NY) try to play streaming music from their phone to bluetooth speakers and fail.

>> My experience is that better quality Bluetooth headsets can handle being paired to multiple devices, cheaper ones will drive you crazy. I have these on my head right now at the office

My experience as well-- just gonna put a little plug here in for the Jabra Elite bluetooth headset, that works really well for me.

Most people aren't aware of that because it isn't a thing. Listening to music and podcasts on an iphone, streamed via WiFi, then resent via Bluetooth to airpods works just fine for me. I can't say why you're having problems with it though

I listen to my phone/AirPods daily over Wi-Fi and cellular and walk up to 3 floors away from the phone to my basement with barely a stutter.

I don't think you explained why you disagree. If it's difficult, why is that wrong, why do you disagree?

Basically, there's a gap between "it works" and "it's effortless" and that's a pricey gap that doesn't net you a lot in return financially.

I think this hits the nail on the head. A device developer will develop a bluetooth gadget. They test it, it works, but they know it's not great. But they know that when a consumer buys it, none of that matters as long as they buy the product and don't return it.

So the trick is to make sure you have a nice feature set which works well enough so that you can gaslight consumers into thinking the failure is their fault. So if it only works half the time, that's fine. Just tell them to turn their bluetooth off and on or to reboot their device. It'll probably fix it and now they think they are at fault.