The Next Generation of Wi-Fi Is Officially Here. But You Don’t Need It (Yet).

If Wi-Fi 7 lives up to the hype, it should benefit homes that have multiple phones, laptops, smart TVs, and security cameras installed, and it should improve performance if a lot of other Wi-Fi routers are nearby. Here are all the ways Wi-Fi 7 promises to improve your life.

A more reliable Wi-Fi connection: Wi-Fi 7 supports Multi-Link Operation (MLO), which will allow your phone, laptop, or TV to connect via two or more of the available Wi-Fi frequencies simultaneously. Those frequencies are 2.4 GHz (which is somewhat slow but capable of transmitting over longer distances and through more walls), 5 GHz (which offers a balance of speed and robust connections but is becoming an increasingly crowded frequency), and 6 GHz (which has the most potential for speed but has a harder time connecting through walls over distance). Switching between frequencies or combining them will produce a speedier, more reliable connection in comparison with connecting to just one frequency at a time, which is what Wi-Fi 5 and Wi-Fi 6/6E connections do.

Think of Wi-Fi 7 like a busy city’s shipping network: Using MLO gives you the option to ship by truck, next-day air, and/or bicycle carrier. The bicycle carrier is the fastest option in a crowded city, but it makes deliveries only in that city. Air is also quick but requires travel through airports, causing long wait times. Meanwhile, the truck is the slowest option, but it can go to spots that the air-freight service and bicycle messenger can’t reach. Like a savvy shipping clerk, an efficient Wi-Fi 7 router and laptop combination can improvise and determine which options are better for that moment—maybe they ship everything via the same method, or maybe they break your packages up and use different shipping methods for the various pieces.

Unfortunately, both the router and the laptop (or any other device) must be compatible with Wi-Fi 7 in order to use MLO, so it can’t help you if you’re using a laptop that supports only Wi-Fi 5 or Wi-Fi 6. We also know that some currently available Wi-Fi 7 routers, such as the Netgear Nighthawk RS700S, won’t support MLO until they’ve received a new firmware update sometime in 2024.

Faster speeds: While Wi-Fi 6 and 6E have 1024-QAM and 160 MHz–wide channels, Wi-Fi 7 offers 4096-QAM and 320 MHz–wide channels. What does that alphabet soup mean? Basically, Wi-Fi 7 has the inherent ability to transmit more data, faster than Wi-Fi 6 or any of the older versions of Wi-Fi can. Think of it like adding seats to a train or bus: More passengers can travel at the same time. Again, both the router and your device must support Wi-Fi 7 for this feature to work, and to get the best speed, your device ideally should be in the same room as the router.

If you dig down into your network settings, you’ll see that sometimes the Wi-Fi is connected at over 600 to 800 Mbps, but occasionally you’ll see it at only 80 or 200 Mbps. What gives? In this case, the culprit is likely to be some interference in the Wi-Fi channel you’re using; in response, your router and laptop shift down to a lower speed in order to keep the signal stable.

Imagine that a Wi-Fi 4 to Wi-Fi 6 network’s radio channel is an airplane. You’re loading an 80-seat plane with passengers, and seat 41 falls across and blocks the center aisle, putting an end to boarding and resulting in wasted space in the rest of the plane. Flexible-channel rules in Wi-Fi 7, akin to removing and skipping over that defective seat 41, allow boarding to resume at seat 42, filling the empty seats and better utilizing the plane’s overall carrying capacity.

Older devices don’t get left out: Wi-Fi router specs often include the supported number of simultaneous streams, expressed as, for example, 2x2 or 4x4. Each stream represents data transmitted to or from the router, such as sending an online Best Buy order to be processed while you’re watching a 4K video stream.

Glance at the numbers, and you can see how many simultaneous streams a router is capable of: 2x2 indicates two simultaneous streams, 3x3 means three streams, and so on. Wi-Fi 6 routers are typically capable of 2x2, 3x3, or 4x4. Most phones, laptops, and streaming boxes can handle only one or two concurrent streams. Wi-Fi 7, in contrast, has the potential to handle six (6x6) or eight (8x8) streams, enough for multiple laptops, streaming TVs, tablets, and gaming consoles all at once. What those additional streams give your network is the ability to serve more devices at once, in different locations.

So to use our transport analogy again, Wi-Fi 7’s multiple streams are like the multiple air routes extending from a single hub airport with multiple runways. Each plane takes off and lands at about the same speed, but since the airport has more runways and taxiways and is therefore more efficient than older airports, it can handle more planes taking off and landing at the same time. This multiple-streams capability in Wi-Fi 7 is one of the few cases where an improvement can benefit devices based on older tech, just as how an airport can handle both slower, propeller-driven planes and speedy jets with the same facilities.

Wirecutter has tested a handful of Wi-Fi 7 routers and mesh systems, including the Netgear Nighthawk RS700S router, the TP-Link Archer BE800 router, the Deco BE85 mesh system, and the Eero Max 7 mesh system. We usually run our router tests with multiple laptops, but since Wi-Fi 7 laptops are still very rare, we instead ran quick speed tests on the Archer BE800 router with a OnePlus 11 5G phone and a gigabit internet connection.

When we used Wi-Fi Sweetspots, a simple Android phone Wi-Fi test app, to test signal strength between the phone and the router, we reached up to 1,400 Mbps, but only with the phone held about a foot from the router. That’s an impressive number, but we achieved it under perfect conditions with the phone and the router passing only minute bits of test data back and forth.

We also used Ookla’s Speedtest; here, Wi-Fi 7 bested Wi-Fi 6 at 5 GHz (reaching 600 Mbps versus 360 Mbps) but scored similarly to Wi-Fi 6E at 6 GHz (also reaching about 600 Mbps). Those results are still pretty speedy, but they’re within the same range as what we’ve seen from the routers we’ve tested in our formal Wi-Fi 6 and Wi-Fi 5 router tests, when several routers produced measured results between 384 Mbps and 644 Mbps. Things may change when we eventually get to test the Wi-Fi 7 routers with multiple laptops simultaneously, but for now we haven’t seen a lot of improvement when using a solitary phone connected to a single router.

Faster is generally better, but during day-to-day internet use you rarely need speeds higher than 25 Mbps for watching 4K videos, say, or 4 Mbps for a busy Zoom call. Downloading a game to your PC could certainly use more speed (100 Mbps to 500 Mbps), but even hardcore gamers aren’t downloading 24/7. Multiply those figures by the number of people in your household to come to a rough estimate of the speed you need.

You don’t need to buy a Wi-Fi 7 router or mesh network right now—or anytime soon. We encourage most people to wait until Wi-Fi 7 is available on every device where you need the speed, such as on work laptops, gaming PCs, personal tablets, smart TVs, and phones. Wi-Fi 7 has the potential to help gamers enjoy improved response time and downloads, to ease tensions while members of the household are watching multiple streaming services simultaneously, and to enhance connections in areas with a dense population of neighbors’ Wi-Fi routers. Wi-Fi 7’s extra streams should also help smart-home cameras, thermostats, and security systems stay connected.

But that time is not yet here. Even early adopters should consider that Wi-Fi 7 is still in its initial stages, and any Wi-Fi 7 purchase you make now is a gamble—you don’t know whether you’ll be able to use, sometime in the future, all the features you’re paying so dearly for right now.

We still plan to put Wi-Fi 7 devices through our updated benchmarking tests later this year to see if any are worth paying for. For now, we can’t recommend Wi-Fi 7 for anyone, unless you’re a bleeding-edge early adopter with a fat wallet, and you’re willing to try Wi-Fi 7 with no guarantees that it will offer any real improvement over the current Wi-Fi 6 or Wi-Fi 6E.

This article was edited by Signe Brewster.