Need faster wireless internet? Wi-Fi 7 promises dizzying speed boosts and smoother connections. Here’s a rundown of the tech behind it—and the gear that can help you upgrade today.
Wi-Fi 7 is a great leap forward for wireless connectivity, at least as far as speed is concerned. The latest wireless standard (also called 802.11be EHT, if you prefer the classic Wi-Fi technobabble name) can push up to 40Gbps data speeds, in some cases, compared with around 10Gbps for the preceding Wi-Fi 6 standard. Many routers, mesh systems, and client devices like phones and PCs now support Wi-Fi 7, which makes it a natural choice if you’re looking to upgrade your tech.
But if you’re like most consumers, you probably won’t see that advertised maximum speed in everyday use. Nor do you need every last drop of it—most residential internet plans deliver 1Gbps or less. Still, Wi-Fi 7 offers plenty of other benefits, so if you’re thinking about updating your wireless network or internet-connected devices in the near future, it should be on your radar.
We’ve extensively tested and evaluated the most popular Wi-Fi 7 devices on the market today, from mesh networking kits to tablets. I’ll explain why you should take advantage of the latest wireless standard’s advancements, even if you might not need all of them right away. What Is Wi-Fi 7? (And Isn’t Wi-Fi 6 Still Good Enough?)
Whereas Wi-Fi 6 offered merely incremental speed increases over Wi-Fi 5, Wi-Fi 7 is mostly about lightning-fast connections. (The «EHT» in the formal name stands for Extremely High Throughput.) A laptop using a common Wi-Fi 7 chipset, like Qualcomm’s FastConnect 7800, can experience speeds up to 5.8Gbps. Meanwhile, the aggregate throughput of a typical quad-band Wi-Fi 7 router or mesh system is 33Gbps.
That’s astonishing. To put that in perspective, it is more than three times faster than Wi-Fi 6 and Wi-Fi 6E, which can hit maximum data rates of 9.6Gbps, and five times faster than Wi-Fi 5, which maxes out at 6.9Gbps.
In addition to offering previously unattainable data rates, Wi-Fi 7 employs new technologies to reduce latency, increase network capacity, and boost efficiency. These are claims and buzzwords you’re probably familiar with from the rollout of Wi-Fi 6 devices.
The latest standard is backward-compatible with Wi-Fi 6 devices, as well as older Wi-Fi 5 (802.11ac) and Wi-Fi 4 (802.11n) ones. If you upgrade your router or mesh system to Wi-Fi 7, your client devices will also require support for Wi-Fi 7 to take full advantage of it. Even if they don’t, they’ll still be able to connect. That’s one of the key reasons we recommend Wi-Fi 7 routers and mesh systems for anyone in the market for a new one, even if you don’t have any or many Wi-Fi 7 client devices.
