CES 2013 BLE®, BT®, and Wi-Fi® Report

At the Consumer Electronics Show - CES held early this January in Las Vegas, Nevada over 3,000 exhibitors showcased a wide variety of innovative technology to more than 153,000 attendees.

Wi-Fi®

802.11ac Wi-Fi routers were presented by nearly all networking vendors at the show. These new and faster routers were advertised for consumer use like the Gaming Router DGL-5500 from D-Link which is the first to use the new Qualcomm® 802.11ac chip. Be sure to read out previous blog post on 802.11ac, 802.11ac and Wi-Fi Client Devices.

Just prior to CES, WiGig, also known as the IEEE 802.11ad announced that it has merged with the Wi-Fi Alliance®. For years, 802.11ad was a separate standard from the existing Wi-Fi protocol. The WiGig standard is similar to the existing Wi-Fi standards but uses the 60GHz frequency band, instead of the 5GHz and 2.4GHz bands. The main drawback of WiGig is the range, which is much shorter than that of Wi-Fi.

Bluetooth®

Bluetooth was showcased at CES in a number of product announcements and new gadgets and devices. Bluetooth v4.0 made an appearance in a variety of products ranging from a watch that allows you to text and answer calls hands-free, a water resistant fitness tracking band, to a battery adapter that allows you to control any battery operated device via smartphone or tablet.