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.”

Netgear is the next company to follow the likes of Luma and Eero with a mesh-based home wifi system-- Orbi, a kit consisting of a router anda "satellites" the company claims cover up to 370 square metres once combined.

Both router and satellite are suitably curvy (as the new trend in home networking hardware dictates), and offer what Netgear describes as a "tri-bend mesh system." Essentially the router sends out three channels, one to extend internet to the satellite and two others to feed the connections of other devices.

The router supports 802.11ac wifi at speeds reaching up to 3Gbps, and ships pre-paired with the satellite fore asy setup. Once the system is installed the satellite can be placed anywhere, and the result is a unified network with a single user-selectable SSID. Also included in the router are a x4 Gigabit ethernet ports and a USB 2.0 jack, while setup options include parental controls with website black/whitelists and time permissions.