What happened
The Bluetooth Special Interest Group, the body that governs the wireless standard, has made Bluetooth High Data Throughput (HDT) an official, optional element of Bluetooth Core 7.0, The Verge reported. The change raises the highest bit rate Bluetooth LE can support from 2 Mbps to 7.5 Mbps, close to a fourfold jump. The group had spent the past year previewing the upgrade.
Wireless audio is set to be the main use, and the first products with HDT support are anticipated at some point in 2027. The added bandwidth is intended to carry high-resolution audio, spatial audio and multichannel surround sound without relying on proprietary wireless formats. The upgrade is also expected to improve reliability and battery life.
Other device categories stand to gain. Smartwatches could send more health and fitness data to a phone with no added battery drain, since quicker transfers let the radio power down sooner. Extended reality devices could work without Wi-Fi, and personal AI gadgets could offload processing to a smartphone, letting them shrink. Bluetooth SIG CEO Neville Meijers said HDT widens the technology's role in consumer, commercial and industrial markets.
Context
The Bluetooth SIG oversees the Bluetooth standard, which its CEO described as the most widely used wireless standard in the world. HDT had been shown publicly by the group for about a year before its formal adoption into the Core 7.0 specification. As with earlier upgrades to the standard, wireless audio is the primary target, while Bluetooth LE had until now been limited to a maximum of 2 Mbps.
The briefing
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