Netgear heads to South by Southwest (SXSW) to announce the Nighthawk Pro Gaming XR300-- a router aimed at gamer customers the company says prioritises online gaming traffic to ensure the best in performance.

Designed to work with Xbox, PlayStation, Nintendo Switch, PCs and mobile devices, the XR300 tunes the Quality of Service (QoS) towards gaming needs. It offers both wireless and wired connectivity via x3 high-performance external antennas, support for both 2.4 and 5GHz wifi and and x4 ethernet ports, and is powered by a dual-core 1GHz processor.

HTC looks to take advantage of upcoming 5G networks as it announces the 5G Hub at MWC 2019-- a combo of dedicated 5G mobile smart hub, Android entertainment device and battery pack.

The 5G Hub is primarily a 5G hotspot, one allowing up to 20 users to connect to the 5G network. It promises connectivity "dramatically faster than 4G LTE networks," and will even allow the streaming of VR content to a headset, with no need for PC or cables. The device runs on Android 9 with HTC Sense and Google Assistant, and can act as a home media centre thanks to a 5-inch 1250 x 720 resolution display, dual speakers and always listening mic.

The Bluetooth Special Interest Group (SIG) announces a direction finding feature with the potential to "significantly" enhance Bluetooth location services by allowing devices to determine the location of a Bluetooth signal.

Bluetooth location services fall in 2 categories-- proximity solutions and positioning systems. Proximity solutions use Bluetooth to understand when 2 devices are near each other, and how far apart. The category includes item finding solutions such as personal property tags, as well as point-of-interest (PoI) information solutions like proximity marketing beacons. The direction finding solution can allow proximity solutions to not only let a user know if if a personal property tag is in the area, but also the direction, enhancing the user experience.

CES 2019 sees D-Link announce a range of 802.11ac Exo routers and extenders, all featuring mesh networking support as well as the addition of 2 years of McAfee end-to-end protection.

Routers on show at CES include the AC3000, AC2600, AC1900, AC1750 and AC1300. Also on show are the AC2000 and AC1300 extenders. All are mesh-enabled and complete with easier plug-and-play setup and easier endpoint additions. The routers and endpoints include a gigabit wired port, while the routers ship with support for both Google Assistant and Amazon Alexa. Powering the routers is a 880MHz dual-core processor.