Wi-Fi 6, Bluetooth LE, or Combo?

1. Connectivity: The First Fork in Any IoT Product

In kick-off reviews, the wireless choice is often treated as a technical detail. Engineering practice says otherwise — it fixes everything downstream:

Getting the radio wrong rarely shows up as "a spec is slightly off". It shows up as a board respin, a full certification round and months of launch delay. That is why this guide does not stop at a simplified comparison table — it goes from technology principles, to product characteristics, to how they are actually used in your industry.

2. The Three Radio Technologies in Depth

2.1 Wi-Fi 6 (802.11ax): Built for Density and Throughput

Wi-Fi 6 is not simply "faster Wi-Fi" — it is a MAC/PHY redesign aimed at many devices talking at once. Four mechanisms matter most for IoT products:

●OFDMA (Orthogonal Frequency-Division Multiple Access): the channel is split into resource units (RUs), so one transmission can serve multiple devices at once. For sensor-dense, small-packet workloads it cuts queueing latency dramatically — the root cause of the classic "Wi-Fi chokes at thirty devices" problem.

●Uplink and downlink MU-MIMO: the AP talks to several stations in parallel. Alinket's ALX856B implements 2×2 MIMO across dual bands (2.4/5 GHz), holding usable throughput even in congested spectrum.

●1024-QAM: 25% more data per symbol than Wi-Fi 5's 256-QAM — a direct rate jump at short range with high SNR.

●TWT (Target Wake Time): the AP and station negotiate wake-up slots, and the station sleeps in between. This is what finally makes Wi-Fi viable for battery devices, and it matters for any edge product that wants bandwidth and power restraint.

Where Wi-Fi stops: generous bandwidth and latency, but a power envelope far above BLE, and a dependence on router infrastructure. Best for mains-powered devices with heavy data and direct cloud connectivity.

2.2 Bluetooth LE and Bluetooth 5.4: The Low-Power King Steps Up

From 5.0 to 5.4, each Bluetooth revision addressed a specific engineering pain. Alinket's ALX420A (based on the Infineon AIROC CYW20706, vendor-declared compliant with Bluetooth Core Specification 5.4) implements the full generation:

Two PHY options

●LE 2M PHY: symbol rate doubles from 1 Msym/s to 2 Msym/s, roughly doubling throughput to about 2 Mbps — firmware updates, bulk commissioning and audio streams stop queueing.

●LE Coded PHY: trades rate for range with S=2/S=8 forward error correction. At S=8 the rate drops to 500 kbps but link budget improves by about 12 dB, giving roughly 4× the coverage. In warehouses, factories and buildings, the number of relay nodes falls accordingly.

Advertising upgrades

●Extended Advertising: breaks the legacy 31-byte limit, carrying over 200 bytes per advertisement — more data per transmission, fewer relays in Mesh networks, richer payloads for beacons.

●PAwR (Periodic Advertising with Responses): new in 5.4, it lets one broadcaster interact bidirectionally with thousands of receiving devices at low power — the protocol foundation for electronic shelf labels (ESL) and large-scale asset tracking.

●EAD (Encrypted Advertising Data): end-to-end encryption of advertising payloads, closing a long-standing exposure in beacon deployments.

Power and link control

●Measured current: 2.69 µA deep sleep, 176 µA advertising (1 s interval), 211 µA connected (600 ms). On a CR2032 (~220 mAh), a pure-advertising duty cycle measures its life in years.

●LE Power Control (5.2): after connection, both peers can adjust transmit power in 1 dB steps across roughly -20 to +20 dBm — lower it nearby to save power and reduce interference, raise it when the link is long or obstructed.

●LE Isochronous Channels (5.2): CIS/BIS time-synchronised streams, the protocol base for LE Audio (multi-stream audio, broadcast audio, hearing-aid enhancement).

Networking

●Bluetooth Mesh: managed-flood architecture with Relay / Friend / LPN / Proxy node roles. A Low-Power Node pairs with a Friend node and sleeps almost permanently, waking only when the Friend has buffered messages — Mesh participation at very low power. Proxy nodes bridge GATT, so an ordinary phone with no Mesh stack can configure the entire network.

Where BLE stops: extremely low power, native phone support and a mature ecosystem, but limited throughput and no direct cloud path without a phone or gateway.

2.3 Combo: One Module, Two Links

A Combo module integrates Wi-Fi and Bluetooth radios in one package, and the engineering value goes beyond saving a part:

●One SKU to manage: one part number, one antenna design, one certification, one supply-chain code.

●Complementary functions: Wi-Fi as the high-bandwidth primary link (cloud, OTA, video), BLE as the near-field channel (commissioning, debugging, fallback). The resulting experience: users commission over BLE in one tap, then the device runs on Wi-Fi autonomously.

●Coexistence: Wi-Fi and Bluetooth collide by nature in the 2.4 GHz band. A mature design arbitrates them in time and shares the antenna so that "Wi-Fi slows down whenever Bluetooth connects" never happens.

The key insight about Combo: two mutually incompatible architecture branches live inside the category — determine your host first (Chapter 5).

2.4 Capability Comparison

3. The Alinket Portfolio: One-Stop Capability from Module to Terminal

Alinket's 47 products divide into smart components (15), smart terminals (22) and smart kits (10). This section walks each family.

3.1 Smart Components: Three Module Families

Wi-Fi modules & controllers (6): ALX830A/B, ALX831A/B, ALX850A/B, ALX855B, ALX856B, ALX890B

●Every part uses the Controller architecture (stack on-module) — a deliberate Alinket design choice. TCP/UDP/HTTP/DNS and the cloud clients all run on the module; the host MCU simply exchanges AT commands over UART and never touches network protocol code. For teams without a Linux group, or anyone compressing a schedule, this turns driver work from months into days.

●Flagship ALX856B: Wi-Fi 6 (802.11ax), 2.4/5 GHz dual-band, 2×2 MIMO, external U.FL antennas, plus roaming, DFS auto channel selection, UDP/TCP in both roles, DNS, HTTP, cloud storage (OSS) and IoT Hub connectivity.

●Security across the family: WPA/WPA2/WPA3/EAP enterprise authentication; -30 to +85 °C; CE/FCC/RoHS pre-certified.

Bluetooth modules & controllers (3): ALX411 (BLE 4.0), ALX412 (BLE 5.0), ALX420A (Bluetooth 5.4 dual mode)

●ALX420A is the flagship: BR/EDR + BLE dual mode with Bluetooth Mesh, Apple MFi certification, LE 2M/Coded, PAwR/EAD, 2.69 µA deep sleep, on-board ceramic antenna in 16×10×2.4 mm.

●ALX412 is the cost-optimised option: BLE 5.0, on-board PCB antenna, 1.8 mm thin — ideal for minimal loads and price-sensitive programmes.

●All three are controller-architecture parts supporting slave / master (1:N) / gateway (master+slave) roles, with configurable broadcast name, broadcast power and TX power.

Combo modules (6): two architecture branches (Chapter 5)

3.2 Smart Terminals: Five Product Lines

●Bridges (4): ALXB10A/B, ALXB15i, ALXB16i, ALX-MWB524F. Core value: make installed Ethernet equipment wireless with zero modification. ALXB10A/B uses Layer-2 transparent bridging, USB power, a 65×50×22 mm housing, EAP enterprise authentication, roaming and country-code configuration, -30~+70 °C.

●Data gateways (7): DGW411, DGW412, DGW611, DGW810, DGW890, ALXR10x, ALX-FBG1000 — covering BLE-to-4G, BLE-to-Wi-Fi and long-range Wi-Fi HaLow topologies.

●Routers & APs (3): ALXN25, WSP25, Linky1.

●Sensors (4): AiKits-PC01, AiKits-AST401, AiKits-ASC401, ASK824.

●Edge computing (4): ALXE10B, ALXEA300-16, AiKits@ED85, AiKits@C38.

3.3 Smart Kits: 10 PCBA Development Kits

ALX411 EVK, ALX420A EVK, ALX850 EVK, ALXC12/ALXC20 EVK, ALXG10 EVK, ALXG20 EVK, ALXG30 EVK, ALKL10 EVK, ALXB10 EVK, ALXB15 EVK — every module and every major terminal has a matching EVK, which is what makes "validate first, then draw the board" practical.

Figure 2 · Four representative modules: Wi-Fi 6 controller (ALX856B), Combo Module family (ALXC2A/B), Combo Controller family (ALXC20A/B) and Bluetooth LE 5.0 (ALX412). For the Bluetooth 5.4 flagship ALX420A, see the official bulletin "ALX420A Ready for Bluetooth 5.4" (2026-08-27).

4. Deployment Patterns: Six Real-World Shapes

Specifications only mean something in context. Here are six ways Alinket products are deployed in the field.

1 · Healthcare: Wireless Without Touching the Equipment

Figure 4 · Healthcare: installed equipment reaches Wi-Fi through a bridge, wearables report via BLE and a 4G gateway (illustrative)

Pain: hospitals run monitors, infusion pumps and analysers that only have wired Ethernet. Re-cabling means downtime and internal approvals; mobile monitoring devices lose their backhaul as 2G networks switch off.

Alinket approach:

●ALXB10A/B bridge plugs into the existing Ethernet port and bridges at Layer 2, turning a wired port into a Wi-Fi uplink — zero modification and zero drivers on the device side, USB powered, plug and play.

●ALX412 (BLE 5.0) + DGW412 (Bluetooth-to-4G gateway) form a two-tier architecture: wearables sample over BLE at very low power; DGW412 aggregates and backhauls over 4G LTE Cat 1 using MQTT, with a built-in 3000 mAh battery and OLED status display in an 82×48×21 mm portable body.

●Together they already support stable connectivity for 30+ device types in medical deployments — ECG, SpO2, blood pressure, temperature and glucose among them.

Value: no equipment changes, no downtime, no software rewrites — and the post-2G data gap is closed in one move.

2 · Elder Care and Bedroom Monitoring: Contactless and Privacy-Friendly

Figure 5 · Elder care: contactless 24 GHz radar monitors heart rate and sleep, with no imaging (illustrative)

Pain: cameras raise privacy objections; wearables are refused by residents; night-time incidents are detected late.

Alinket approach: the ASK824 radar vital-signs monitor — 24 GHz FMCW radar detecting heart rate and sleep state without contact, 0.3–2.5 m range, 60° horizontal and 80° elevation coverage; data uplinks over dual-band Wi-Fi (2.4/5 GHz); 115×115×30 mm, 110 g, DC 5 V.

Value: no imaging, nothing to wear — privacy preserved. Abnormal heart rate and bed-exit events raise immediate alerts, and the form factor suits volume deployment in care homes and private homes alike.

3 · Industrial Sites: Multi-Protocol Aggregation at the Edge

Figure 6 · Industrial site: an edge gateway aggregates multiple fieldbuses and uplinks to the cloud (illustrative)

Pain: factory equipment speaks every protocol at once (RS485, CAN, Ethernet, DI/DO); the environment demands wide temperature and wide voltage input; direct cloud links are unstable.

Alinket approach: the ALXE10B industrial edge gateway — i.MX6Q quad-core Cortex-A9 @1.2 GHz, 2 GB DDR3 + 16 GB eMMC, with 4× RJ45, Wi-Fi and full-band 4G for uplink, and RS485×2, CAN×2, RS232, DI×4, DO×4, GPIO and OTG for the field side; DC 6~35 V wide input, -30 to +85 °C.

Value: one box bridges fieldbus and cloud, handling protocol conversion and data pre-processing at the edge — less upstream traffic, less cloud coupling.

4 · Commercial Lighting and Buildings: Mesh Without Gateways

Figure 7 · Commercial lighting: Bluetooth Mesh networking without gateways, the phone is the commissioning tool (illustrative)

Pain: large-scale lighting and environmental control means heavy cabling, many repeaters, and commissioning that needs a specialist on site.

Alinket approach: ALX420A Bluetooth Mesh modules supporting every node role (Relay/Friend/LPN/Proxy). LE Coded PHY extends single-hop coverage and cuts repeater count; extended advertising increases payload per transmission; Proxy nodes let an ordinary smartphone configure the whole network with no Mesh stack.

Value: scale smoothly from a handful to thousands of nodes, with the phone as the commissioning tool — after-sales cost drops accordingly.

5 · Large Campuses and Warehouses: Sub-1 GHz Long Range

Figure 8 · Campus & warehouse: a single Sub-1 GHz gateway covers a very large area (illustrative)

Pain: warehouses, campuses and agricultural sites are large, device-dense and hard to power; conventional Wi-Fi under-covers them and BLE cannot reach.

Alinket approach: the DGW890 data gateway — dual-radio Wi-Fi HaLow (IEEE 802.11ah, Sub-1 GHz) plus Wi-Fi 4 (2.4 GHz), AP/STA/Bridge modes, roughly 1 km open-field coverage and 8000+ connected devices; -30 to +80 °C, DC 12 V, 115×85×35 mm.

Value: Sub-1 GHz diffracts well and penetrates with low loss, so a single gateway covers far more ground than conventional designs — fewer nodes and fewer sites.

6 · Smart Appliances and Audio

Figure 9 · Smart appliances and audio: one combo module carries the Wi-Fi and BLE links at once (illustrative)

●Smart appliances: ALXC20A/B (MCU host) or ALXC2A/B (Linux host) Combo modules combine Wi-Fi cloud connectivity with BLE near-field commissioning.

●Audio: ALX420A supports LE Isochronous Channels, A2DP, SPP and Apple MFi certification, giving LE Audio and Apple-ecosystem products a head start.

Value: one module covers both links — certification, antenna design and SKU management all halve.

5. Selection Framework: Four Questions, Two Branches

5.1 Four Questions

Figure 1 · Four-question decision flow: starting from the four questions at the top, the flow resolves the three solution classes (Wi-Fi 6 / BLE / Combo), then branches Combo into two non-interchangeable families (Module / Controller) by host architecture.

5.2 The Combo Fork (the decisive step)

"Combo" is not one category — it is two mutually incompatible architecture branches:

●Linux application processor (OpenWrt / embedded Linux) → Module family: Wi-Fi over SDIO, Bluetooth over HCI, with the Linux kernel owning both stacks. Models: ALXC2A/B (Wi-Fi 6 dual-band 2×2 + BT 5.0), ALXC29B (802.11ac), ALXC28/B (cost-optimised 2.4 GHz).

●MCU / RTOS (no host OS) → Controller family: both stacks run on the module; the MCU drives it over UART with AT commands. Models: ALXC20A/B (dual-band Wi-Fi + BLE 5.0), ALXC12A/B (cost-optimised 2.4 GHz).

Cost of getting it wrong: an MCU project that buys a Module part has no OS to run the stacks and cannot start; a Linux project that buys a Controller part caps Wi-Fi 6 throughput at the AT-command bottleneck and pays for on-module compute it never uses.

Figure 3 · Combo architecture fork: left — Linux application processor → SDIO + HCI → Module family (no stack; carried by the kernel); right — MCU/RTOS → UART + AT → Controller family (stack on-module; no host OS required).

6. Why Alinket

Beyond any single module's specification, Alinket differentiates on six capabilities that never appear on a datasheet's front page:

1. Controller architecture as the default. Except for the Linux-oriented Module family, Alinket modules put the stack on-module and drive the host with AT commands — you can ship a connected product without a Linux team, in days rather than months.

2. One ACM command set across Wi-Fi and Bluetooth. Commands validated on the ALX856B largely carry over to the ALX420A, so migration between product lines costs very little.

3. 47 products sharing one specification language. The whole portfolio uses a unified parameter framework, so any two parts can be compared row by row instead of across incompatible datasheets.

4. Industrial-grade across the range. Modules -30 to +85 °C, gateways -30 to +80 °C, edge terminals -30 to +85 °C — harsh deployments included.

5. Pre-certification reduces compliance risk. CE/FCC/RoHS on the modules (ALX420A adds MFi; DGW412 adds SRRC), inheritable by the end product — shorter schedules, lower failure risk.

6. One-stop delivery and long-term supply. Modules, terminals, EVKs and the cloud platform come from one supplier, backed by continuous firmware updates and a long-term supply commitment that keeps your product manufacturable in three or five years.

7. Conclusions

Compress this guide into three moves:

Move 1 — First answer "who accesses the data." Before any specification. Cloud backend → Wi-Fi leads. Phone proximity → BLE leads. Both → Combo. Most selection errors happen when teams skip this question and pick by "the radio they already know."

Move 2 — Then ask the host architecture (Combo only). Linux application processor → Module family (SDIO + HCI, the kernel owns the stacks); MCU/RTOS → Controller family (UART + AT, stacks on-module). Getting this wrong costs more than any spec miss — the first leaves the project unable to start, the second caps Wi-Fi 6 throughput at the AT-command bottleneck.

Move 3 — Treat lifecycle cost as a spec. Certification inheritance, command-set consistency, supply continuity and EVK path — none show up on the throughput table, all decide whether your product can still ship in three years.

Bottom line: selecting a module is selecting a partner's engineering capability, not a parameter row.

Alinket shortens this decision chain with 47 modules on one parameter language, one ACM command set across Wi-Fi and BLE controllers, industrial-grade temperature throughout and pre-certified parts — two steps (three classes, two branches) on your side, the engineering capacity on ours.

Next step: tell us your device form factor, power source and data flow. Alinket's engineers will map it to specific part numbers and provide samples with matching EVKs — from selection to volume production, we are with you all the way.