Answer: More Mobile Phones than your Bluetooth Marketing device can talk to, so why would you try and reach 1 km?
Many Bluetooth manufacturers will talk about how their devices can reach distances of up to 1 km, don’t be fooled! To understand why, you firstly need to know some basics…
Types of Bluetooth
The Bluetooth standard has two main classes of radio: Class 1 and 2. Class 2 communicates up to 10m (most phones are Class 2) and Class 1 can transmit up to 100m (bloo2 Pod Max and Lite are Class 1).
Did you know?
A single Class 1 transmitter can only serve up to 7 simultaneous connections (i.e. talk to 7 phones). Therefore, a bloo2 Pod Lite with one Class 1 transmitter can communicate or download to 7 phones at once, where as the Max can communicate to 21 phones as it has 3 transmitters. This capacity is the key to effective Bluetooth Marketing.
What is the ‘real’ reach of a Bluetooth zone?
If you couple a Class 1 device with a Class 2 device, you can effectively increase the range of the Class 2 device from 10m to up to a maximum of 30 metres for most phones. You CANNOT reach any further than this as the Radio Frequency power output from a phone is simply too low to be able to communicate back to a Bluetooth Marketing device.
Bluetooth Marketing is a two-way conversation as the sending device needs acknowledgment from the users phone for permission to send or decline.
Imagine…
You could build a magic Bluetooth box that could communicate for 1000m or even 1800m to phones and the phones had huge antennas and power supplies strong enough to talk back… the system would still not work.
This goes back to the capacity issue highlighted earlier. If you could reach every phone in a 1 km radius your Bluetooth device simply would not have enough capacity to serve every phone. It’s like having a super-long network cable and running it to every home with a PC within a kilometre, the network would grind to a halt because there would simply be to many devices to serve.
So how can you reach more phones over larger distances?
Only through networking Bluetooth devices together, with the bloo2 product range, “30 metre Zones” can be connected together giving a blanket coverage of Bluetooth Zones over any distance which importantly will have enough capacity to server the majority of phones in the area without becoming oversubscribed.
Just like in computing, in the early days people believed one super computer would calculate everything just as they now believe one Bluetooth box might reach all phones. Single “Zones” can be linked together to provide maximum capacity communicating with phones over large r distances.
Size isn’t everything, capacity coverage is! This is the secret of successful long range Bluetooth Networking.
Tags: antenna, bluetooth marketing, range
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