Bluetooth Special Interest Group announced version 6.0 of the nearly ubiquitous wireless technology in September 2024, adding several important new features aimed at making Bluetooth more reliable, secure, smooth and efficient. It may even increase the distance between the headphones and the phone, as well as extend battery life.
We're finally seeing devices with Bluetooth 6.0 appear, including Apple and Google phones, as well as headphones and earbuds. Here's what you need to know about Bluetooth 6.0 and how it will impact wireless communications in the coming years.
Major improvements to Bluetooth 6.0
Delay
Latency is the time between when an audio signal is sent and when you actually hear it. The higher the latency, the more annoying it can be – think about when the audio lags behind the video in movies or games. Most Bluetooth devices (5.0 and newer) have a latency of 50 to 100 milliseconds, depending on hardware and configuration, which is noticeable to most people.
Bluetooth 6.0's new Isochronous Adaptive Layer, or ISOAL, allows devices to break audio data into smaller chunks for faster processing. In theory, this could potentially reduce latency, and it's possible that we could see latency of less than 10 milliseconds under ideal conditions such as close proximity and no obstacles or interference.
In real-world use, we expect most installations to run around 20 milliseconds of latency, which will still be a significant improvement over Bluetooth 5.x.
Location tracking and security
One of the most interesting features of the new specification is called Channel Sounding, which provides a significant increase in the accuracy of device location tracking. It relies on the direct exchange of data packets between connected devices and a combination of timestamps and frequency analysis, rather than the older, less accurate method of simply measuring relative signal strength.
Channel audio is a boon for Apple Find My and its Google and Samsung counterparts, providing location accuracy of up to about 10 centimeters, as well as increased resistance to obstacles and interference. It also provides increased security to Bluetooth lock systems, using a combination of encryption, randomization, and location cross-referencing to ensure that some random person doesn't open your car or front door.
Energy efficiency and pairing speed
The same features that reduce latency also help improve power efficiency: everything works smarter to use more power to sync audio and video for things like games, and less power for less resource-intensive applications like audiobooks. This flexibility is especially important for wireless headphones, which require maximum power management due to their compact size.
The scanning process for nearby Bluetooth devices is also being upgraded to include decision-based filtering and advertiser monitoring. Advertising in this case does not imply selling you products. Essentially, this is a set of headphones that broadcast: “I am a headset, I am nearby and ready to connect.”
Instead of constantly shouting, “Is anyone here?!” To see if there's anything nearby to connect to, Bluetooth 6.0 devices will monitor when previously paired devices move in and out of range. This should save valuable battery life, speed up pairing, and provide smoother multi-point switching.
What Bluetooth 6.0 Doesn't Do
Improved Bluetooth sound quality (possibly)
Have you been waiting for reliable, lossless wireless audio transfer from your phone to your headphones? Not there yet.
Keen readers who note that CD-quality lossless audio requires 1.4 Mbps of bandwidth may wonder why Bluetooth 6.0's theoretical speed of 3 Mbps is not enough. This is because most of the Bluetooth bandwidth is taken up by overhead—a set of ancillary data needed for secure Bluetooth connections that has nothing to do with audio. While there is some codecs that promise high-quality wireless audio, lossless CD-quality audio remains elusive.
Bluetooth 6.0 includes the additional long-discussed LC3plus codec, which can transmit audio at up to 24-bit and 96 kHz. However, unlike “regular” LC3, it is an additional codec and comes with a separate license fee. This means that adoption will be limited compared to more popular codecs. Remember that in order for your device and headphones to work, they must be compatible with the LC3plus. How well it works and whether it can reliably transmit information 24/96 in the real world remains to be seen.
The upcoming optional version of Bluetooth 6.0 promises to add a high data throughput feature that will open up useful bandwidth for lossless streaming, perhaps by using other frequency bands beyond the crowded 2.4 GHz band to achieve speeds of up to 7.5 Mbps. This should provide enough headroom to carry high-resolution audio streams, although it's unclear whether manufacturers will adopt the right codecs to deliver lossless Bluetooth audio through headphones. Given the past and current adoption rates of various Bluetooth codecs, it's unlikely that it will be Apple, and instead the technology will first find its way into lesser-known Android phones.
Where to find Bluetooth 6.0 right now
If you want to take advantage of Bluetooth 6.0 compatibility, there are several devices already available (though not all of them are available in the US).
