Answer
Short answer: Yes, potentially more disruptive — here's why.
How normal BLE connections handle interference
Standard BLE connections use Adaptive Frequency Hopping (AFH). The two connected devices continuously monitor channel quality and maintain a shared "channel map" that marks bad channels (busy with Wi-Fi, other BLE, etc.) as unusable. The connection then hops only across the good channels, actively avoiding interference. It's a cooperative, bidirectional mechanism — both sides communicate to maintain it.
Why Auracast / BIS is different
Auracast uses Broadcast Isochronous Streams (BIS), introduced with Bluetooth 5.2 / LE Audio. A BIS transmitter sends audio to an arbitrary number of unknown, anonymous receivers — there's no pairing, no ACK, no bidirectional link.
This breaks AFH completely, because:
- No feedback channel exists. The broadcaster has no idea who is listening, so receivers can't report channel quality back.
- The hop sequence must be deterministic and pre-published. Receivers need to know exactly which channel to listen on at any given moment before they receive anything. This means the hopping pattern is fixed and mathematically derived from broadcast parameters (not negotiated).
- BIS uses a fixed channel map, meaning it cannot skip over channels that happen to be busy with Wi-Fi traffic, other BLE connections, or other Auracast broadcasts.
The practical consequences
Because a BIS transmitter will transmit on a channel regardless of what else is using it, it can collide with other BLE connections or co-exist less gracefully with 2.4 GHz Wi-Fi. A normal BLE connection would have adapted around those busy channels.
Additionally, Auracast transmits continuously at a fixed isochronous interval (e.g., every 7.5ms or 10ms for audio), which creates a predictable, repetitive occupancy pattern across the 2.4 GHz band — potentially causing sustained interference to nearby devices on overlapping channels.
Mitigating factors
It's worth noting that the degree of extra disturbance is often modest in practice:
- BLE channels are only 2 MHz wide, and the hop sequence still covers all 37 data channels over time
- TX power levels are generally the same as normal BLE
- Auracast is designed with pre-transmission redundancy (sending the same packet on multiple channels/times) rather than retransmission, which can increase overall air time usage slightly
So in dense BLE environments (e.g., a concert venue with hundreds of devices — exactly where Auracast is intended to be used), the lack of AFH is a genuine and known trade-off in the specification design.