Bluetooth: a 1994 standard that still fails at two meters

Bluetooth still drops the connection at two meters, three decades on

Bluetooth turns three decades old and the complaint hasn't changed: past the one-meter mark, the connection starts acting up. The standard traces back to 1994, and its operating band, 2.4 GHz, is the same one used by old WiFi networks and microwave ovens. That technical detail explains a good part of the dropouts. The striking thing is that in 2024, with artificial intelligence being sold as a selling point on every device, no one has put on the table a replacement that actually works better.

Why does Bluetooth share a frequency with the microwave?

The 2.4 GHz band is free and universal, which is why headphones, the mouse, the keyboard, the speaker and even the appliance that heats your food all use it at the same time. It's an unlicensed spectrum: anyone can transmit there without paying for a concession. The result is a permanent traffic jam in which devices step on each other. The most cited case is that of someone sharing Internet from their phone while using wireless headphones: that's where the connection drops every other minute. With four or five gadgets transmitting in the same air, a collision is guaranteed.

At what distance does Bluetooth stop working?

The figures from everyday use are short and fairly consistent with each other. It fails when there is more than one meter of separation between devices. Some equipment loses the link at two meters. And some headphones hold up to 4 meters without breaking a sweat. The range depends less on the specification than on the specific device. Another little-studied household factor also comes into play: the signal degrades when there's a bathroom in between, probably due to the tiles and the humidity in the air.

Is it the standard or the cheap devices?

Here the disagreement is outright. One camp holds that the problem is not the technology but the hardware: a high-end computer with expensive peripherals from well-known brands works "very, very well," while a trackball bought online can fail the second time you try to pair it. Critics respond that they've been hearing that promise for two decades and that they have never seen it work decently on any device, not in cars, not in headphones, not in any gadget. For this group the pattern is always the same: it fails, fails and fails again. The most common way out is not to fix anything: it's to plug in the USB dongle and forget about it.

Is there a better alternative to Bluetooth?

Several have been proposed. Infrared, which was already on old mobile phones, is remembered as "even worse": it required direct line of sight and short distances. The classic USB dongle remains the real alternative for mice and keyboards, and some argue it works better than pairing. Radio gets the most passionate defense: a hundred years later it maintains a dignity that no modern wireless connection has matched. The question remains unanswered why, with faster and more efficient technologies available, no one has marketed a mass replacement.

And that's where everything gets stuck. There is no standardized replacement, no roadmap, and every manufacturer keeps selling the same problematic pairing under a new name. A hundred years of radio, three decades of Bluetooth, and the question is still up in the air: if the standard is so bad, why can't anyone retire it?