COVER FEATURE
GET YOUR BEST EVER Wi-Fi
You don’t need to upgrade to Wi-Fi 7 to boost your wireless-internet speed and coverage.
Robert Irvine
explains how to optimise your current home network
Wi-Fi has steadily evolved over the past 25 years, since the first routers for home users went on sale. It’s now difficult to imagine life without wireless internet, which makes it frustrating when our Wi-Fi connection slows or drops altogether in certain areas of our homes.
WHAT YOU CAN DO
• Discover why Wi-Fi 7 is currently overkill for most home users
• Switch your router to the fastest available Wi-Fi channel
• Separate your Wi-Fi bands for optimum performance
• Measure your router’s Wi-Fi signal to identify weak spots
• Expand Wi-Fi coverage with an extender or powerline adapter
• Upgrade your ISP router to Wi-Fi 6 or a mesh system
Each new Wi-Fi standard promises to solve such problems, by offering higher bandwidth, faster speeds and the ability to connect more devices, but this also requires upgrading your hardware. The latest version, Wi-Fi 7 (officially called IEEE 802.11be) is now available on most new routers, and is a big step up from Wi-Fi 6 (802.11ax).
But before you rush to buy a Wi-Fi 7 router, you should consider whether you actually need one. Even if the router supplied by your internet provider is showing its age, a new Wi-Fi 7 model could be overkill.
In this feature, we explain why it may still be too early to upgrade your home network to Wi-Fi 7, regardless of its benefits and improvements.
We also reveal how to boost your current Wi-Fi speed and coverage for free, by tweaking your router’s settings and position. And if you’re happy to spend a little money to get the optimum Wi-Fi, we recommend the best Wi-Fi 6 routers and other home-networking devices to help you achieve that aim.
WHY YOU DON’T NEED Wi-Fi 7 (YET)
Wi-Fi 6 is fast enough
The main selling point of Wi-Fi 7 is its incredible speed. Theoretically it can deliver speeds of up to 46Gbps, which is nearly five times as fast as the 9.6Gbps achievable by Wi-Fi 6 and 6E.
The problem is that 46Gbps broadband connections are still a long way off, so you won’t get anywhere near the maximum speed promised by Wi-Fi 7. Currently, the fastest broadband for UK home users is Sky’s Full Fibre 5 Gigafast+ (www.snipca. com/57626, see screenshot below), which offers 5Gbps with a Gigafast+ Wi-Fi 7 hub. It’s only available to customers on the CityFibre FTTP network and costs £80 a month.
CityFibre is reportedly upgrading its infrastructure to support 50Gbps, but it won’t be ready until 2032 at the earliest. Last year, Openreach and Nokia tested a 50Gbps offers speeds of up to 5Gbps connection (www.snipca. com/57627), but again it will be a few years before it rolls out to the public. According to Ofcom, the UK’s average broadband speed in 2025 was 223Mbps, which even Wi-Fi 5 routers (up to 3.5Gbps) support.
Sky’s Full Fibre 5 Gigafast+ fibre broadband
You should also consider whether you’ll ever need that much speed. The Wi-Fi Alliance says Wi-Fi 7 is ideal for “augmented, virtual and extended reality, immersive 3D training and ultra-high-definition video streaming” (www.snipca. com/57628). But only the latter is likely to appeal to home users (who have 4K or 8K TVs), and it’s already sufficiently supported by Wi-Fi 6 and 6E.
You don’t need to connect 100 devices
The other big advantage to Wi-Fi 7 is that you can connect more devices to your home network without any congestion or diminished performance. It supports 16 data streams (compared to Wi-Fi 6’s eight), providing more ‘lanes’ for simultaneous connections.
Like Wi-Fi 6E, Wi-Fi 7 uses the 2.4GHz, 5GHz and 6GHz bands, but supports wider channels in the latter – 320MHz compared with 160GHz. This effectively doubles how much data can be sent at once.
It also has an innovative feature called Multi-Link Operation (MLO), which allows devices to send and receive data across two bands at the same time. Not only does this increase transfer speeds, it also reduces latency (data-transfer delay) and gives you a more reliable connection. If one band experiences interference, the data is seamlessly switched to the other (see screenshot above).
The combination of these features means you can comfortably connect over 100 devices to your Wi-Fi 7 router simultaneously. However, even in a large, tech-obsessed household, it’s difficult to imagine when you’d be using that many. Wi-Fi 6 supports 30 to 50 devices per router, which is more than enough for most homes.