The Bluetooth Special Interest Group (SIG) is laying out its case for Bluetooth’s role in the ‘Ambient Internet of Things.’ The 2.4 GHz IEEE 802.15.1 PHY layer has lost ground in the IoT to the 802.15.4 family, now mostly centered around Zigbee and Thread, despite having its own mesh networking implementation. Bluetooth Mesh missed its window. After attending a soft launch event, back in 2015, it was frustrating to see so many delays before the official launch of Bluetooth 5 – in July 2017. During that time, Thread made a lot of noise, and both Zigbee and Z-Wave were vibrant alternatives. There was a clear benefit to having a smartphone-native low-power mesh protocol, but the market was not interested, and…