Do You Really Need Wi-Fi 7? Most People Probably Don

Slow Wi-Fi can be a frustrating waste of time with pages that fail to load and endless buffering, but the move to Wi-Fi 7 could be an overcorrection for many people, since these routers still cost quite a bit more than their Wi-Fi 6 counterparts. Wi-Fi 7 offers impressive speed improvements across 2.4GHz, 5GHz, and 6GHz with multi-gigabit throughput, but really, most people don’t need anywhere near that speed. If you’re ready to upgrade your home network, Wi-Fi 7 tech could be overkill and a waste of money.

Do you really need Wi-Fi 7?

Is Wi-Fi 6 still fast enough?

There’s more to Wi-Fi speed than an expensive router. For many people, Wi-Fi speed is more impacted by signal quality and interference. For example, if you live in an apartment complex, the signal from all of your neighbors’ Wi-Fi networks will impact your speeds, as your router needs to work around these other signals. Wi-Fi 6 did a lot to combat this interference with upgraded tech like 1024-QAM and OFDMA, which can work around the interference a bit more. While Wi-Fi 7 takes this up to 4K-QAM, most people will find plenty of speed with Wi-Fi 6.

Wi-Fi 6 clients support either 1201Mbps or 2402Mbps depending on their bandwidth support, so you could easily achieve gigabit speeds with Wi-Fi 6. That being said, if neighboring connections are preventing you from reaching these speeds, 6GHz may be the answer. With Wi-Fi 6E, a 6GHz band was added, and while it offers the same speed as 5GHz on paper, there’s a lot more spectrum available at 6GHz, so there’s little to no congestion. In fact, 6GHZ Wi-Fi in the U.S. has enough spectrum for seven concurrent 160MHz wide Wi-Fi bands.

Is Wi-Fi 7 more secure?

Like Wi-Fi 7 routers, most newer Wi-Fi 6 routers support the WPA-3 security protocol, which is much harder to crack than WPA-2. While this is a big deal for security, many people will continue to run their networks with both WPA-2 and WPA-3 since a lot of Wi-Fi devices don’t support WPA-3, and likely won’t be updated for it.

For the most part, Wi-Fi 6 offers the same level of security as Wi-Fi 7, though newer routers will likely receive software updates for longer. As long as your Wi-Fi 6 router is still being supported with software updates, though, you can keep using it without worrying too much about security.

What about coverage?

Wi-Fi coverage is one of the main reasons people want to upgrade their routers, and unfortunately, Wi-Fi 7 doesn’t come with the coverage improvements that people may expect. The problem is that one of the biggest limiting factors in coverage is the power levels allowed for routers. Wi-Fi routers are allowed to use their chunk of 2.4GHz, 5GHz, and 6GHz spectrum at a power level set by the FCC to keep from interfering with other devices using wireless signals. Widening these bands to 160MHz or 320MHz offered faster speeds at the cost of coverage.

If you noticed a drop in coverage moving to a newer and faster router, these wider bands are likely the reason. Wi-Fi 6E and Wi-Fi 7 at 6GHz have to use even lower power levels than 5GHz, and were only allowed indoors as the FCC worked to ensure that others using the 6GHz bands have moved on.

If you need whole-home Wi-Fi coverage and a single Wi-Fi 6 router isn’t doing the job, a single Wi-Fi 7 router likely won’t either. If you want to keep it simple, upgrading to one of the best mesh Wi-Fi systems will do a lot more to solve your coverage problem than Wi-Fi 7. You could also get a standalone router with multiple access points from a brand like UniFi, or you could even get the best of both worlds with something like the Eero PoE Gateway and some Eero PoE access points.

Related

A beginner’s guide to mesh networks

If your router can’t provide reliable Wi-Fi coverage throughout your house, you might want to look into a mesh setup.

Some people still might want Wi-Fi 7

If you’ve got a decent Wi-Fi 6 router and a gigabit internet connection or slower, there’s not much reason to upgrade. But if you’re still on Wi-Fi 5, there’s nothing wrong with skipping straight to Wi-Fi 7. Wi-Fi 7 routers are better than Wi-Fi 6 routers in almost every way besides cost, so if you’re not worried about the cost of Wi-Fi 7 routers, you could be in store for a massive upgrade as we saw with our review of the Wi-Fi 7 TP-Link Archer BE800.

If you’re building a mesh system, Wi-Fi 7 could help preserve the full speed of your connection. Mesh Wi-Fi systems must use some of their capacity to send data between the nodes, so if you’re connected to one of the remote mesh nodes, there simply may not be enough capacity for the full speed of your connection. Wi-Fi 7 mesh systems, like the TP-Link Deco BE85, add a ton of capacity with faster 5GHz speeds and 6GHz speeds, allowing for multi-gig mesh performance.

Last but not least, if you’ve got a very fast internet connection, such as 5Gbps fiber, Wi-Fi 6 will struggle to keep up. There are plenty of high-end Wi-Fi 6 routers that support 10Gbps Ethernet, but once you move over to wireless, you’re looking at just 2402Mbps over Wi-Fi. Wi-Fi 7 routers take that up much higher with bands that are double the width at 320Mbps. While you’ll never see the full speed of these Wi-Fi connections outside of lab conditions, Wi-Fi 7 will be able to deliver much higher Wi-Fi speeds than Wi-Fi 6 or Wi-Fi 6E in this case.

You get more for your money with Wi-Fi 6

If your old router just isn’t keeping up with your needs anymore, and you’re ready for an upgrade, a Wi-Fi 7 router could be a solid move with plenty of speed and a ton of capacity. If you’re looking for a good deal, however, Wi-Fi 6 is still a much better bargain with even mid-range and high-end Wi-Fi 6 routers. Many of the best Wi-Fi routers you can buy are still using Wi-Fi 6, and if you get a quality model like the Asus RT-AX88U Pro, you’ll get plenty of performance with 2.5Gbps Ethernet support. At the end of the day, Wi-Fi 6 still offers more bang for your buck if you have an internet connection with gigabit speeds or slower.