Walk into any electronics store today, and you will see them: boxes adorned with aggressive fonts, futuristic angles, and price tags that rival a used car. Wi-Fi 7 has arrived. The marketing promises are seductive—speeds that beat wired Ethernet, latency so low it’s imperceptible, and the ability to handle a smart home with a hundred connected devices.
Technically speaking, the hype is real. Wi-Fi 7 is wider, faster, and smarter than anything we have seen before.
But there is a catch. Actually, there are three. While Wi-Fi 7 is a massive upgrade to the technology, it is currently an underwhelming purchase for most folks. It is a Ferrari stuck in a school zone, and for the vast majority, buying one in 2026 will be a waste of money.
The three Wi-Fi 7 bottlenecks that mean you shouldn’t bother
You can’t make use of it, so what’s the point in upgrading?
Wi-Fi 7 is full of amazing new tech, upgraded speeds, and so on. But if it’s so good, why is it still not worth upgrading to?
ISP bottleneck
|
IEEE Standard |
Wi-Fi Alliance Name |
Year Released |
Frequency |
Maximum Data Rate |
|---|---|---|---|---|
|
802.11ac |
Wi-Fi 5 |
2014 |
2.4GHz & 5GHz |
1.3Gbps |
|
802.11ax |
Wi-Fi 6 |
2019 |
2.4GHz & 5GHz |
10-12Gbps |
|
802.11ax-2021 |
Wi-Fi 6E |
2021 |
2.4GHz, 5GHz, & 6GHz |
10-12Gbps |
|
801.11be |
Wi-Fi 7 |
2024/2025 |
2.4GHz, 5GHz, & 6GHz |
40Gbps |
When it comes to much faster internet, Wi-Fi 7 has you covered, with a theoretical maximum throughput of 46 Gbps. That’s a crazy amount of internet.
The only problem is that if you called your ISP and said, “I’d like a 46 Gbps connection, please,” they’d laugh you out of town. As while a Wi-Fi 7 router might be capable of pushing 40 Gbps wirelessly, but your ISP is capping you at whatever speed you pay for.
And while there are some 10Gbps home network connections, they’re few and far between. In fact, there are some 50Gbps fibre plans, but as you can guess, they’re super expensive and available in even fewer locations than the 10Gbps connections. For example, Ziply’s 50 Gig plan will set you back a whopping $900 per month—and you have to provide your own router.
In that, though, buying a Wi-Fi 7 router for a 500Mbps connection isn’t going to automagically bring you faster internet. That’s just not how it works.
Your device doesn’t support Wi-Fi 7
Devices manufactured since the middle-to-end of 2024 may support Wi-Fi 7. But any hardware manufactured before that time is unlikely to support Wi-Fi 7, period. That’s because Wi-Fi 7 only officially launched in January 2024, and it took a while for manufacturers to begin shipping devices with upgraded Wi-Fi cards that enable them to play nicely.
Buying a Wi-Fi 7 router won’t force your older devices to use the new wireless standard. The number of Wi-Fi 7-enabled devices has expanded massively throughout 2025, but most hardware still uses older Wi-Fi standards.
I don’t need as much speed as my ISP tries to sell me, and you don’t either
Don’t spend on speed you never use.
A good Wi-Fi 7 router still costs a few hundred bucks
If you head to Amazon and start searching for Wi-Fi 7 routers, you’ll be in for a pleasant surprise. Despite how amazing this tech is, you can pick up a shiny new Wi-Fi 7 router for under 100 bucks!
Wrong.
Don’t be tricked by the marketing on those sub-$100 Wi-Fi 7 routers, as they’re missing one of the new Wi-Fi standards’ best features: the 6GHz band. Those cheaper options are only dual-band, and don’t deliver the upgraded capacity you’re probably most interested in.
That means you also miss out on another of Wi-Fi 7’s best upgrades, Multi-Link Operation (MLO), which basically bonds the 5GHz and 6GHz bands into something much better. Instead of using either 5GHz or 6GHz, your devices can connect across multiple bands simultaneously. Your phone can send data over 5GHz and 6GHz at the same time. If one band gets interference, the data instantly flows through the other. This results in a connection that is incredibly resilient and has near-zero latency.
Similarly, without the 6GHz band, you can’t use Wi-Fi 7’s much larger 320MHz Wi-Fi channels, again negating one of the key points of upgrading.
So… is it actually safe to use a TP-Link router today?
The leading router brand in the US is under attack.
Wi-Fi 7 will be an amazing upgrade—when it’s actually worth using
Wi-Fi 7 brings some undeniably fantastic upgrades to Wi-Fi. The three main pillars of Wi-Fi 7, MLO, channel width, and density, are impressive and will be the core of home networking for years to come.
It’s not just the speed, mind. Wi-Fi 7 has some specific security upgrades that also make it worth upgrading to… when the time comes.
For me, in the UK, fibre speeds are limited. The maximum I can get in the little corner of Cornwall is a 2Gbps connection, so it makes little sense for me to buy a Wi-Fi 7 router, and it’s probably a similar case for you, too.