The penny-dropped and I saw Bluetooth as more than just another wireless standard which after even a decade of life is still finding itself competing against rivals which can be higher performance and lower cost. 

See Bluetooth as just a technical standard and you miss the point, and the beauty of it.

This realisation was important for I had been about to dismiss the notion of running the Bluetooth protocol over an 802.11n WiFi wireless link as strangely pointless.

After all wouldn’t Bluetooth running over 802.11n links lose its identity and become WiFi?

No, because Bluetooth is not just a wireless communications interface standard. It is an application. Or more accurately, it is a number of different wireless applications.

This is best understood when you consider the wireless headset, the most successful Bluetooth product by a country-mile, which is used by so many mobile phone customers in cars and on the street.

It could be argued that the wireless headset would not have happened without Bluetooth. They are even referred to as Bluetooth headsets.

So when companies like Broadcom and Motorola suggest that running Bluetooth over WiFi links in order to increase its data rates from today’s ordinary 1Mbit/s to 100Mbit/s and beyond, they are recognising Bluetooth’s power to define the application.

The hope is that by giving Bluetooth a high speed radio ‘pipe’ like 802.11n the list of applications will multiply significantly. More importantly the applications could move into areas which as yet do not exist.

Low speed Bluetooth did it with the mobile headset and just maybe high speed Bluetooth running over 802.11 WiFi radio links will do it again in the area of video and audio links.

Right now communications chip suppliers are hungry for any new wireless application, so it makes sense to turn to Bluetooth for inspiration.

See also: Electronics Weekly's Focus on Wireless, a roundup of content related to wireless communications.