There are plenty of short-range wireless technologies currently under development that use the SHF/EHF bands to send data at very high speeds. There is plenty of bandwidth up at 60GHz. Furthermore, the processing power of affordable chips is very high, so they can control an array of antennas that send the signal exactly where the other end of the connection is (WiFi is starting to do this, and cellular networks have done this for a while). For connecting your hard drive and monitor to a nearby laptop, I think this will work fine.
The big "problem" with these bands is that they don't propagate through walls, or even your hand or a sheet of paper. But with beamforming they can go around your hand, so it's not a problem for things like connecting to monitors, in theory.
Wall penetration is a big problem for WiFi. WiFi's very limited bandwidth is shared among all stations that can hear each other. When walls block the signal, it's like you're creating a brand new Universe free of other stations and interference, and so you get free bandwidth. This is why corporate AP deployments turn _down_ the power of their access points, so they only cover a small area, thus allowing the system to have more total bandwidth.
Ideally the clients would also turn down their transmit power, but they don't because that's bad for benchmarks and reviews, so they kind of ruin this by bleeding their signals intended for the nearby AP into the range where other clients that can't hear that AP are. Fortunately things like beamforming and MU-MIMO are fixing this, by allowing receivers to move a null in their receive antenna system to where the unwanted device is, thus providing isolation from nearby devices and increasing the total bandwidth of the system. We've been promised this for years but it's still in what I think are the early stages.
(As for the use case of "I want one WiFi router to cover my whole city!" we're not there yet. You need an AP in every room, with a wired backhaul. Meshing might solve this... but it is also in the very early stages.)