Source: Hackaday
Researchers have extended Bluetooth beyond its designed 100-meter range by modifying transmission power and antenna configuration, exposing the gap between technical limits and regulatory boundaries. The implication is straightforward: Bluetooth could handle mesh network applications currently dominated by Zigbee and LoRaWAN, shifting IoT infrastructure away from specialized protocols toward the device ecosystem already saturated with Bluetooth silicon. The practical constraint has always been regulatory and economic—power consumption, chip design—not physics. Expect Bluetooth's official range specifications to increase as manufacturers optimize for longer-distance use cases without fragmentation.