William Webb

I'm William Webb.

I'm a telecoms expert and I've been working for 35 years now in the world of mobile communications.

So I've actually lived through the whole process of the invention of Bluetooth.

And I can certainly remember a time when people thought it was just a crazy idea and would never catch on and never be used.

So it's great to be sat here talking about it now.

So if we take the example that you mentioned of Bluetooth working with your headset, playing some music or a podcast whilst you're cycling along, what's actually happening here is, first of all, the phone itself is getting that content.

It's then transmitting a radio signal from a Bluetooth chip, a special Bluetooth chip on the phone.

And that radio signal travels in all directions, including towards your headphones.

And that radio signal is being what's called modulated.

It's being changed by the phone in a way that reflects the music.

So the music will be digitally stored.

It will be a sequence of ones and zeros.

And what in essence happens is that radio signal will be made slightly louder for a one, slightly weaker for a zero.

the signal will travel to your headphones they have a little antenna and then they'll be able to notice it getting louder and weaker and they'll turn that back into ones and zeros and then they need to turn that into actual music and then you hear it in your ears so that in a nutshell is how it all works but of course there's a lot more to it than that okay so let's go through that step by step so you said that bluetooth uses radio waves to send information can you explain how it does that exactly

Yeah.

So radio waves are actually something that's called electromagnetic waves.

And in fact, light is part of the electromagnetic spectrum.

So radio waves are, in fact, just a lower frequency version of light.

And frequency, it's how many waves you see in a particular period of time.

So if you imagine waves crashing on a beach, if you had one every...