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The Bluetooth Mesh standard actually is based on a Bluetooth 4.0 feature set (basic advertising and scanning), so really any BLE device can support it. The problem is that the software is complicated, so typically only newer devices have software support.

Many chip vendors have BT mesh implementations, including Nordic, TI, SiLabs, Cypress, Dialog, and ST.

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As I recall it's not a particular good mesh networking standard either. I think all the nodes just blindly rebroadcast all packets.

I can't remember the exact details but I remember being disappointed when it was announced and I looked into it.

It’s a little bit better than that, in that only some nodes rebroadcast everything while you can have lower-power nodes be primarily in transmit mode. But yes, I think the spec could use a lot of improvement.

It does seem like there’s a lot of momentum in the BT-SIG to grow the standard over a long period of time, and there also are a lot of active contributors, so I do expect it to mature in the future.

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