Linksys is the next company to take on the mesh wifi concept as it announces Velop at CES 2017-- a multi-router system promising to envelope (thus the name) the house with wireless bandwidth.

The Velop system uses a tri-band 802.11ac MU-MIMO mesh network, with one band dedicated to communication between routers to prevent some of the bottlenecks two-band systems suffer from. The routers also include two ethernet ports in case customers prefer cable connectivity. The mesh system is self-healing, and can handle up to 5 Velop units to ensure wifi coverage in even the largest of houses.

Inside the routers is a quad-core ARM Cortex-A7 CPU, 4GB flash storage and 512MB DDR3 RAM, together with wifi and Bluetooth radios. Interestingly support for Amazon Alexa is also included for users wanting to take advantage of voice-based control.

The Bluetooth Special Interest Group (SIG) gives the final stamp of approval to Bluetooth 5 as the latest version of the wireless networking standard-- one with longer range, faster speed and larger broadcast message capability.

Specifically, Bluetooth 5 promises up to x4 the range, x2 the speed and x8 the broadcast message capability compared to the previous version. As a result it should be able to power whole home and building coverage, enable more responsive, high-performance device and allow for more context relevant solutions. Also included are updates helping reduce potential interference with other wireless technologies, allowing it to coexist with other networking standards within the Internet of Things (IoT).

LuxLive 2016 sees the world's first test of li-fi, the lighting-based networking system developed by Scotland-based pureLiFi, in a live setting-- one featuring the streaming of a video to a tablet.

The li-fi system was connected to the tablet via USB. When Harald stood directly under the Power over Ethernet (PoE) adapted stage lights, a network was quickly detected, although the signal soon started to fade as he moved further from the lights. This means the technology, at least so far, still has a short range. In fact, each li-fi lighting fixture has a range of sixty degrees and 7-8 square metres, and as such multiple enabled luminaires need to be used to widen available coverage.

"Wireless communication is lacking frequency," pureLiFi's Dr. Harald Burchardt tells LuxReview. Li-fi technology has the ability to widen the capacity of our wireless communication options."

According to ABI Research, 2017 will mark another milestone in Bluetooth technology through the release of Bluetooth 5 specification, further pushing wireless networking technology as the leading connectivity solution for the IoT.

The analyst forecasts 2021 Bluetooth Smart and Smart Ready device shipments reaching 5 billion units, the result of technical enhancements opening new opportunities, use cases and device types. Outside of mobile space, key IoT market growth areas include smart home and smart lighting, beacons and wearables, among others.

“While smartphones and audio accessories remain Bluetooth’s largest markets, the technology is becoming more attractive to low-power IoT applications,” ABI says. “Though Bluetooth still faces strong competition from the other standards, mesh networking will enable new opportunities for the technology in the smart home, building automation, and emerging IoT markets in which robustness, low latency, scalability, minimal power consumption and strong security are all additional critical requirements.”

According to ABI Research the 802.11ad (aka WiGig) chipset market will reach a "critical juncture" in 2017, thanks to the technology increasingly penetrating PCs, smartphones, tablets and other connected devices.

Since WiGig certification is currently underway, the analyst predicts WiGig chipset shipments will reach over 1 billion in 2021, as the technology enables wireless docking and enhances multimedia streaming, data transfer between devices, and networking applications. In addition more manufacturers should start making WiGig chipsets, including Broadcom, Intel, Lattice Semiconductor, MediaTek, Nitero, Peraso and Qualcomm, helping cut costs of the first WiGig-enabled devices.

“A major challenge for WiGig in moving to the 60GHz band is to build up an ecosystem and solid set of use cases to drive growth,” ABI says. “WiGig-enabled docks can be costly, and OEMs may choose not to implement the technology if there are only a limited number of devices that will work with the accessories.”

The Wifi Alliance certifies WiGig, the wireless networking standard operating in the 60GHz spectrum promising to enable multi-gigabit performance in a variety of short-range applications.

The wider 60GHz band is less congested, and complements the existing 2.4 and 5GHz wifi bands. It transmits data at speeds reaching up to 8Gbps and low latencies, with beamforming aiming signals directly at devices. Signal range reaches 10m-- short, but suitable for wired-grade line-of-sight scenarios both in-room and outside.

WiGig can find use in smartphones, portable PCs, tablets and access points, as well as home entertainment and general CE. ABI research predicts 2017 WiGig chipset shipments will reach 180 million in smartphones, before reaching 1.5 billion in total by 2021.

Netgear presents what it claims is its fastest router yet-- the Nighthawk X10 AD7200, a router featuring a 1.7GHz quad-core processor together with Quad-Stream Wave 2 architecture and 802.11ad wifi.

The result, the company says, is wireless speeds reaching up to 7.2Gbps as powered through tri-band wifi radios operating in the 2.4GHz (802.11n), 5GHz (802.11ac) and 60GHz (802.11ad) bands. In addition, MU-MIMO technology adds simultaneous streaming support, a 160MHz radio doubles wifi speeds to mobile devices and four antennas maximise wifi range and throughput.

Another company first comes in the shape of a 10gigabit port with fibre support allowing for fast backups and streaming from NAS devices. A pair of USB 3.0 ports allow the connection of storage devices, while 6 months of free Amazon Drive handle cloud-based backups.

MIT researchers propose a means to triple wifi data speeds while doubling signal range and ease increasingly congested wireless networks-- MegaMIMO 2.0, a system able to eliminate signal interference.

The technology uses a processor, real-time baseband processing system and a transceiver board to vary the frequency range of wifi signals within the required spectrum. This allows multiple independent transmitters to transmit data on the same spectrum to multiple independent receivers, without signals interfering with each other.

“In today’s wireless world, you can’t solve spectrum crunch by throwing more transmitters at the problem, because they will all still be interfering with one another,” the researchers say. “The answer is to have all those access points work with each other simultaneously to efficiently use the available spectrum.”