 Hello Zwifters and welcome to another episode of How to Run on Zwift. Today we're asking what on earth is Ant Plus and I've heard of Bluetooth but isn't that for connecting my AirPods to my iPhone? What on earth has it got to do with Zwift? Well today we'll find out. In simple terms both Ant Plus and Bluetooth are ways of sending data or information over short distances between different devices. Ant Plus was invented in 2003 specifically for use in sports tech to send heart rate data, cadence, revolutions per minute, power and all sorts of other information from external devices attached to say a bike or a body onto a central unit such as a running watch or a bike computer. This information is then combined with information recorded on the main unit such as time, distance, GPS track and then it's written to a file such as a GPX file, a TCX file or a fit file which is then a record of your activity. And then along came smartphones and smartphones started to use a technology called Bluetooth. A Bluetooth was actually invented in 1994 so technically slightly older than Ant Plus. Sports tech companies cottoned on to this and started producing devices that would broadcast in Bluetooth low energy or BLE or Bluetooth smart as it's also known. And eventually partly due to public demand companies started producing dual broadcast devices. So if you have a stride foot pod for example that can broadcast on both Ant Plus and Bluetooth at the same time. So which one should you use? Which one is better? Well as with all these things there are advantages and disadvantages to both, however in my opinion there is a winner. The only major advantage that Ant Plus has over Bluetooth is that Bluetooth can only connect to one device at a time. So if your heart rate monitor is connected to your phone it can't therefore connect to Zwift. For new users this can be a source of confusion when connecting to Zwift. Why is my signal not there? You have to make sure that you've disconnected your device from any other device before trying to connect it to Zwift. When training indoors there is possibly one other minor issue which could cause problems. Bluetooth operates on the 2.4 GHz frequency. Now that is the same as your Wi-Fi router. This could potentially cause a clash of signals. I have to say this has never been an issue for me or at least I've never noticed it being a problem. The thing that Bluetooth has over Ant Plus both of them operate within that range at 2.4 GHz. However Bluetooth is able to move between frequencies in the 2.4 GHz range whereas Ant Plus is stuck at 2.457 MHz and can't move at all. Therefore Ant Plus is more likely to suffer from interference from your Wi-Fi router. One of the advantages that Ant Plus used to have in sports tech was that it was ubiquitous. Every company produced Ant Plus devices and very few produced Bluetooth low-energy devices. That's simply no longer the case anymore. And the fact that you can connect your Ant Plus foot pod to more than one device at a time is great but in reality when are you going to need that? Why do you need to do that? If you're running on Zwift you connect your foot pod to Zwift and that's it. You shouldn't have to connect it to anything else. One major disadvantage of Ant Plus in indoor training is that actually other than your watch it won't connect to anything without a dongle. As far as I know does Android need a dongle? Nobody uses Android anyway. So if you want to connect to a PC or a Mac then you need a USB dongle plugged into your computer. If you want to connect via an iPhone which Zwift doesn't support anyway then you'd need a dongle plugged into your iPhone. Bluetooth on the other hand these days is supported across the board on multiple devices on multiple platforms. So iOS, Android, Mac and a PC as long as you've got the latest version of Windows installed on your PC then you can connect Bluetooth to all of those devices and all of those platforms. Now here's the thing. You might still have an old Ant Plus peripheral lying around that you want to use to connect to Zwift on iOS for example and actually you can do that with the use of a device called a bridging device. So a bridge will convert your Ant Plus signal to a shiny new Bluetooth smart signal. There are a couple of devices that will do that for you. One is the cable device which is from North Pole Engineering and the other is the Viva 4i chest strap. Ironically developed and sold by Victoria Brills who works for 4i and was the original inventor or part of the team of original inventors of the Ant Plus protocol. So there you go. In the early days of Zwift when everyone used Ant Plus there were constant complaints of signal drops from Ant Plus peripherals, power meters or whatever they might be. Remember Zwift started for cycling so it was mainly bikes that were being used. The advice was always to buy a USB extension cable and still is to bring the USB Ant Plus dongle closer to whichever device was broadcasting, power meter, cadence sensor, whatever it was. Conversely if you scroll through the Zwift riders or Zwift runners Facebook pages you will generally see fewer complaints about dropped Bluetooth smart signals. The consistency and the reliability of the Bluetooth low energy signal is rarely an issue. That said Ant Plus is still very good and it is used without problems by thousands of runners and riders across the world to this day. So in the end the choice is yours. If you are still using Ant Plus technology and you're happy with it and it's giving you no problems by all means carry on. But despite technically being the older technology Bluetooth, Bluetooth smart, Bluetooth low energy is the new young upstart in sports tech and it's taking over from Ant Plus. If you're running on Zwift I highly recommend using Bluetooth to connect your devices. It is supported across the board, it's very reliable and it's dead easy. And that's it for this episode of how to run on Zwift. Thanks for watching. Please do comment down below what your preference is and Plus or Bluetooth. No judgment here. Take care, we'll see for the next one. Bye bye.