While Bluetooth Mesh is coming of age, the question still lingers about if commercial lighting will actually adopt it? On the surface, Bluetooth Mesh has all the right ingredients to make smart lighting a reality as a component of smart buildings. It is reliable, secure, scalable, and mainly, affordable. Bluetooth Mesh also uses industry-standard, government-grade security and has low energy consumption when compared to the energy usage of WiFi. It’s ability to scale is probably what is most impressive, as up to 32,000 devices can be added per network. And with a range of as much as 1,000 meters that can be controlled from a single point, ease of use and management become major factors. The article below does an excellent job of providing the advantages of Bluetooth Mesh and also compares it to other commercial lighting options.
Conceived in 2015 and adopted in July 2017, Bluetooth Mesh is a networking protocol based on Bluetooth Low Energy that’s designed to create large-scale device networks by allowing for many-to-many (m:m) communication over Bluetooth radio. The protocol is ideally suited for building automation, sensor networks, and other IoT solutions where tens, hundreds, or thousands of devices need to reliably and securely communicate with one another.
But will it see widespread use in the professional market, as some experts have predicted?
In an industry where Power over Ethernet (PoE) was forecast to experience large-scale adoption in 2018 but still remains in its infancy, lightED tapped experts from both the lighting manufacturing and electrical distribution sides to weigh in on the potential for Bluetooth Mesh now and in the future, and what distributors need to know about this emerging technology.
