The benefit of Bluetooth is its relative ease of coupling two devices that support it to share data, with the downside being its generally slow speed, around 128 Kbps-723 Kbps. While good enough for voice calls to pass through to your Bluetooth headset, it can be agonizingly slow for larger file transfers.

Enter a new technology lovingly dubbed "alternate MAC/PHY" (rolls off the tongue, no?) whose gist can be summed up as "Bluetooth over Wi-Fi" — after two devices discover each other and pair using Bluetooth, any initiated file transfer will actually pass the communication over to the Wi-Fi hardware layer to perform faster data transfer up to its 54 Mbps maximum limit. At the end of the file transfer, control passes back over to Bluetooth once again.

The other good news is that apparently we won't have to wait too long to see the new standard, which will officially be unveiled this April, in operation — some Broadcom chips being produced today actually already have the alternate MAC/PHY functionality built-in, so it would only require a software update to take advantage of it in devices using these chips. Happily, Gizmodo reports that the new technology lives up to its blazing speed claims as well; check the continuation of this post for a video of Bluetooth over Wi-Fi in action.
 

Bluetooth over Wi-Fi from Gizmodo on Vimeo.

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