Bluetooth’s next release, Bluetooth 5, and will quadruple range, double speed, and increase data broadcasting capacity by 800% — says the Bluetooth Special Interest Group (SIG). They also say that 5.0 will deliver “connectionless” IoT, boosting beacon and location-based capabilities in home, enterprise, and industrial situations. So we can look forward to IoT connections that make full-home and building and outdoor use cases a reality.

In the Bluetooth SIG boastware we read the befuddling statement that “increasing broadcast capacity will propel the next generation of connectionless services such as beacons and location-relevant information and navigation.”

Hang on, I think I got it — “connectionless” is supposed to mean that with Bluetooth 5 you do not have to do the handshaking procedure (pairing) to link to a data source before you are authorized to get the data you want. Just the thing you want for small-area navigation like on airports, warehouse inventory tracking, emergency response, and smart city infrastructure to help the visually impaired. But why call Bluetooth 5.0 “connectionless” is a mystery to me as IMHO no data exchange can exist without a connection of some kind.