November 1, 2025
When Bluetooth ads clap back
Periodic Advertising with Responses (PAwR): Bidirectional Bluetooth Advertising
Bluetooth “ads” can finally talk back — and the comments are feral
TLDR: Bluetooth’s new PAwR lets devices “broadcast” and reply in huge, low‑power networks, promising simpler, two‑way control. Comments split: fans say it beats complex mesh for star-style systems; skeptics question security, real-world range, and whether phones will actually support it—still a big deal for massive IoT.
Bluetooth just got spicy: with a new feature called PAwR (Periodic Advertising with Responses), those short wireless “shout-outs” your gadgets send can now talk both ways. Think: thousands of battery-powered tags or sensors taking turns to reply to one hub. The dev crowd is buzzing, and the top comment vibe is basically: “Mesh is shaking.”
Cue the brawl. One camp swears PAwR is the long‑awaited fix for massive, low‑power networks—badges, beacons, warehouse tags—without juggling tons of fragile connections. The other camp claps back that Bluetooth Mesh still rules many‑to‑many setups, and that PAwR’s “optional” encryption is a liability. Range claims using a long‑reach mode (called Coded PHY) sparked eye‑rolls too—“Cool in labs, but does it work in a mall?” Meanwhile, practical devs ask the killjoy question: will phones actually support this, or is it a “silicon vendor demo only” moment?
Memes launched at light speed: “Bidirectional advertising—so the ads argue with me now?” and “My fridge can finally gossip back.” Others hailed it as “TDMA but make it cute,” since devices get assigned time slots to avoid radio chaos. If you want receipts, commenters linked the Bluetooth 5.4 spec and a Silicon Labs demo video: spec, demo. Verdict: huge potential, but the crowd wants real deployments, not just slick dev‑kit flexes.
Key Points
- •Bluetooth LE advertising has historically been unidirectional, pushing bidirectional use cases to connections, which are limited by airtime and memory.
- •Bluetooth Core Specification 5.4 (Jan 2023) introduced PAwR to enable bidirectional, large-scale communication without per-connection overhead.
- •PAwR builds on Extended Advertising and Periodic Advertising and assigns response slots to mitigate collisions in a centralized star topology.
- •Compared to Bluetooth mesh, PAwR offers optional EAD security, long-range via Coded PHY, low power by design, simpler implementation, and scalability beyond 10,000 nodes.
- •The article outlines PAwR foundations, operation, design steps, application suitability, use with Coded PHY, and presents a Silicon Labs-based demo.