Jon Honeyball wants to make you Wi-Fi Aware as a new standard comes into town

There's a potentially fun and funky new WiFi protocol coming soon for your mobile devices. Called WiFi Aware, it's a similar idea to the existing WiFi Direct protocol - but while that technology has been largely ignored, this one has me genuinely excited.

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Currently supported by both Android and Apple, WiFi Aware is a peer-to-peer protocol that lets wireles devices find one another and communicate directly, without having to go through a base station or router. Any compatible device can broadcast a list of interfaces that it supports, and any other one can discover it and initiate a high-speed connection with very low latency.

Best of all, the technology allows multiple connections between multiple devices at the same time, so your phone can be connected to a number of different WiFi Aware devices at once, without affecting its normal WiFi operation.

This is a golden example of alliances doing something good. WiFi Aware is a creation of the WiFi Alliance, the cross-industry group that develops and manages WiFi all standards. That's one reason it works across both major mobile platforms - the last thing anyone needs is a networking platform that's exclusive to iOS or Android, or any other OS come to that.