The Bluetooth SIG says it will announce Bluetooth 5.0 this week, with promises of twice the speed and four times the range for its low power profiles, and an eightfold improvement in its broadcast messaging capacity. Also in the works is the launch of its mesh networking implementation, which would finally see the SIG provide a protocol that is ideal for IoT developers – now becoming urgent in the wake of the announcement of JupiterMesh by the rival ZigBee community last week. ZigBee, and the fellow 802.15.4-based protocol Thread, are mesh-enabled, and JupiterMesh has pushed ZigBee a step ahead of the pack. By contrast, while there are vendor-specific implementations of Bluetooth mesh, notably from Qualcomm/CSR (which has fed heavily into the standard too), the official…