Bluetooth 5 introduced "coded PHY", which allows ranges of over 1 km in ideal conditions. As I understand it, adding support for this wouldn't even require new hardware for most recent phones.

The real obstacles here are political, not technical, as evidenced by the complete absence of any built-in solution that could be so useful in both everyday life (messaging a family member on the same plane when sitting separately, national park trips etc.) and emergencies.

We literally got smartphone-to-satellite comms now, but we're lacking the most barebones peer-to-peer functionality.

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IshKebab 6 hours ago | parent [-]

Huh I didn't know about that. Seems like it uses 8 symbols per bit to increase the range (but I would very seriously doubt you ever get close to 1km except in super ideal "both in a field in the middle of nowhere" scenarios that never actually happen.

Apparently it's an optional part of Bluetooth 5, so not necessarily supported. However I just checked my phone (Pixel 8) and it is supported. You can check in the nRF Connect app.

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ostacke 5 hours ago | parent [-]

It falls quite close to the "super ideal scenarios" you described, but Nordic did a real world test and got a range of 1300 m using coded phy.

https://devzone.nordicsemi.com/nordic/nordic-blog/b/blog/pos...

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IshKebab 5 hours ago | parent [-]

Interesting, so it roughly doubles the range. So we might be looking at like 50-100 m in the real world I guess.

	▲	lxgr 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Regular Bluetooth already has 100 m of range, at least for class 1 devices like most Apple devices. (Many older/non-Apple devices are class 2, which only does roughly 10 m. Very noticeable difference in an office environment using headphones.)