BLE vs. ANT+ - a winner has been declared!
Garmin has recently announced that future development of ANT+ has been suspended. This article outlines the history of ANT+, and what has led to Garmin effectively declaring that ANT+ is now legacy technology.
The ANT+ protocol was first released in 2003, followed by the low power variant ANT+ in 2004. Originally created by Dynastream, it became the property of Garmin when they acquired Dynastream in 2006. Garmin made ANT+ an open protocol (subject to modest licence fees), and it became a de-facto standard for connected sports equipment. It was successful as it sufficiently low power to be used by devices powered by a small battery, and became supported by multiple vendors.
ANT+ is a networking protocol linking devices built on top of Nordic Semiconductor’s Shockburst proprietary 2.4GHz protocol.
The arrival of Bluetooth Low Energy
Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) was launched in 2010. It was designed to overcome the main drawbacks of what is now known as “classic” Bluetooth, principally the high power consumption. For devices sending relatively little data, Bluetooth was inefficient, as it required a permanent connection to be maintained.
Although technically different in a number of ways, BLE was attacking the same problem as ANT+ in so far as it was offering a flexible, public domain low power radio networking protocol. Originally developed by Ericsson, the BLE was put in the public domain in 1998 under the control of the Bluetooth SIG, an independent multivendor supported body.
Crucially, BLE attracted the widespread support of Phone, Tablet and Computer manufacturers, with native BLE support becoming standard in such devices in a few years following the initial release of the standard. ANT+, by contrast, only ever attracted support on a very limited number of devices.
ANT+ and BLE co-existence
ANT+ continued to be widely supported in sports equipment, and in many ways remained better adapted to that use case. At the time of the launch of BLE, ANT+ benefited from an installed base of sports accessories, for which interoperability was required. In some ways the development of BLE aided ANT+, due to the support of Nordic Semiconductor. Nordic established themselves as the market leader in BLE due to their low power experience with Shockburst, and offered chips and protocol stacks that supported both ANT+ and BLE. In this way ANT+ benefited from the substantial investment and advances In BLE hardware
Lack of Phone support.
However the lack of widespread native phone support started becoming a major drawback, as users increasingly wanted to directly connect their sports accessories to the phone, and later, to the cloud. Sports accessory manufacturers ended up often having to support both ANT+ and BLE, adding to the complexity of their devices. Over time, many decided to drop ANT+ support, giving them access to wider range of hardware.
Garmin announces the end of support for future development of ANT+
Early this year effectively announced that future development of ANT+ would be stopped. To be precise, it stated that
- The ANT+ membership is being discontinued
- That ANT+ certification is being discontinued (as of 30 June)
- Future development of ANT+ profiles is discontinued
The immediate cause is development of this move is EU/RED regulations that mean ANT+ would require significant security upgrades that would in turn require major re-engineering of the ANT+ protocol. Arguably, the decline and end of ANT+ has been on the cards for some time, as the phenomenal success of BLE has meant that ANT+ was always going to struggle to compete. It is notable that Nordic Semiconductor (a long time supporter of ANT+) does not seem to offer ANT+ support on its next generation nRF54 platform.
Practical implications for users.
Clearly, devices that are ANT+ compliant on 30th June will continue to work and interoperate with other devices on 1st July. However it is hard to see that many OEMs wanting to design new devices based on ANT+, when there is no way to validate them, officially at least, and they may not conform with current EU directives. Any new development of sports device one would imagine would based on BLE. Hopefully the Bluetooth SIG adding any profiles to fill in gaps left by ANT+.
Insight SIP offer for ANT+ and BLE
As our miniature RF modules are based on Nordic Semiconductor chipsets, we have offered support for both ANT+ and BLE with our devices. For any manufacturer wanting to transition from a pure ANT+ solution, our modules therefore offer an ideal base to facilitate this process. We would recommend the ISP1807, which is fully certified for ANT+ and BLE, and has a large memory capacity to hold both protocol stacks and the user application.
Conclusions
The electronics industry loves standards, and hates having multiple standards doing more or less the same thing. Although ANT+ and BLE had differences in the way they worked, both were fundamentally ad-hoc low power networking solutions. ANT+ didn’t do much “wrong”, and there are a number of people who argue that the BLE offer has significant gaps for sports related applications. Nevertheless, connectivity the phone proved a critical factor in the final reckoning, and Garmin clearly decided that continuing ANT+ development was not going to be profitable.
