We’ve been covering data throughput over Bluetooth connections in the past – please read our blog of February 2014, https://community.arm.com/iot/b/blog/posts/bluetooth-technology-for-wearable-devices . Since then the situation changed drastically with BLE.

The latest specs, 4.2 and 5.0 allowed BLE to reach data throughput using extended packets and low connection intervals. With these latest revisions BLE data rates approach the rates of the generic Bluetooth performance.

Running our BLE dotstack^TM, on Synopsys’ development board with Synopsys’ 5.0 Link Layer and PHY, we achieve 1.3+Mbps data throughput in a practical data transfer application. Please note that a theoretical limit for BLE 4.2/5.0 is 2Mbps. Using the same processor but BR/EDR we reach 1.5Mbps (theoretical limit is 3Mbps).