iPhone programmatically use wifi and Bluetooth at the same time?

Question

I'm interested If an iPhone/ iPad can use both wifi and Bluetooth at the same time for video streaming? I got a camera app that sends pictures through wifi, and am thinking if I can mirror this at the same time using Bluetooth. (Get a picture from wifi, resend it through Bluetooth) Does wifi and Bluetooth use different antennas? Or is it one at a time or some form of sharing the same antenna?

Thank you!

Answer 1

Wifi and Bluetooth use overlapping frequencies in the 2.4GHz ISM band. In general this means they can conflict over the air. Smartphones use a single combo chip that does both the Bluetooth and Wifi (and potentially FM radio and GPS). These chips have "coexistence" logic that basically let each mode signal its activity to the other mode such that they can avoid clobbering each other. For example, if a BT packet is being transmitted, a Wifi packet may be delayed to wait for the BT to complete.

This coexistence is handled automatically by the hardware, so an end user will likely not be able to tell the difference and it will appear that BT and Wifi can operate simultaneously. But since they do block each other, there will be some decrease in maximum throughput if you were trying to max out a wifi and BT connection at the same time.