What is the difference between Bluetooth 3.0 and BLE?

Question

i want to know the fundamental difference between BLE and Classic Bluetooth and why exactly is BLE low power?

Answer 1

There are quite a few differences between Bluetooth Classic and Bluetooth Low Energy including:

• Classic Bluetooth operates on 79 frequency channels, whereas BLE uses only 40.
• Classic Bluetooth has a higher throughput than BLE, although the gap is becoming narrower with newer versions of BLE.
• A classic Bluetooth device can only be connected to 7 other devices, there is no theoretical maximum to BLE.
• The two use different mechanisms for broadcasting/connection. Classic only devices cannot find or connect to BLE only devices and vice versa.

The list goes on beyond the above to the point that it is more common to assume that they are two protocols only sharing a few technical similarities and the same standardisation body (The Bluetooth SIG).

As to what makes BLE low power, this lies in the duty cycle of the protocol. BLE devices sleep for most of the time they are not in operation, and only wake up to send bursts of data and then go back to sleep. Of course this depends on the use case; if an application continuously sends BLE data then there will be fewer sleep intervals and therefore the power consumption will match that of classic Bluetooth.

For more references regarding this question, please see the list below:

• 4 Key Differences between Classic Bluetooth and BLE
• The difference between Classic Bluetooth and BLE
• Bluetooth vs Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE)
• Bluetooth vs BLE
• Can a Bluetooth LE powered device discover a classic Bluetooth device and vice-versa?

I hope this helps.