[g0ran]

"In 2025, Garmin announced that they would end their certification for ANT+ devices, blaming changes in wireless communication regulations. This is likely to lead to future devices dropping ANT+ support in favour of BLE."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ANT_(network)

I believe that's what the author was referring to when describing it as failed, but yes, this could've been worded better.

[HeyLaughingBoy]

That's interesting. As the article says, ANT's main use case is in commercial gym equipment. What the article doesn't say is the reason: it excels at gathering data for "group fitness". ANT is a connectionless protocol so in a situation where you have two dozen transmitters and you need to get data from all of them, your receiver simply has to listen and record whatever devices it sees and let the user software (possibly managing a gym leaderboard for a spin class) decide which ones to track.

Contrast with BLE where you would have to make a connection to each device. The overhead of connecting and disconnecting, in addition to being power-prohibitive, takes too long. Some manufacturers have workarounds to enable use of their BLE products in a group fitness environment, but they are pretty much lacking.

It'll be interesting to see how the problem is solved if indeed ANT+ does go away.

[IshKebab]

BLE could do that too via advertising packets. I don't know if any devices actually do though.

Also the connection process isn't power-prohibitive for BLE, and it doesn't have to take a long time. It's just that most Bluetooth software stacks suck balls. Basically only Apple's is good.

As I recall BLE only supports hosts connecting to 7 peripherals simultaneously which is a bit rubbish, but if you're a gym with some custom ANT+ receiver you can definitely get a custom BLE receiver that can connect to more devices (assuming someone makes such a thing).

[HeyLaughingBoy]

Many devices put the data into the Manufacturer-specific part of the advertising packet. It's a workaround. The problem is that it's non-standard so if you're a provider of data management for group fitness you have to have custom code for each manufacturer (and sometimes different devices from the same manufacturer). And it's especially fun when the manufacturer's published data spec doesn't match what the device actually puts out!

I don't know how difficult it would be to connect, grab a bunch of data and disconnect from 24 BLE devices in a one-second period, which is pretty much what you'd need to be an effective workaround for ANT+. In a competitive environment, data from each device changes very rapidly.

[Lio]

Aha! OK that's sad news but makes perfect sense. Thanks.