Wi-Fi 6 or Wi-Fi 7: is the upgrade worth it

Router boxes now carry Wi-Fi 7 badges and prices to match. The standard is real and the improvements are genuine. Whether they reach you depends almost entirely on things outside the router.

Your broadband is probably the limit

A mid-range Wi-Fi 6 router can move data around a house faster than most UK broadband connections deliver it. If your line is 67Mbps FTTC, or even 150Mbps full fibre, the router is not the bottleneck and a faster one changes nothing about how quickly a page loads.

Where a better router does help on a slow line is congestion: many devices competing at once. That is a Wi-Fi 6 feature, not a Wi-Fi 7 one, and Wi-Fi 6 hardware is now cheap.

What Wi-Fi 7 adds

Three things matter. The 6GHz band, which is empty compared with the crowded 2.4 and 5GHz bands but does not travel through walls well. Wider channels, which raise peak speed in the same room. And multi-link operation, which lets a device use two bands at once and mainly reduces latency rather than increasing throughput.

All three need a device that also speaks Wi-Fi 7. A Wi-Fi 7 router talking to a three-year-old laptop performs like a Wi-Fi 6 router.

When to buy it anyway

If you are on gigabit fibre, have recent phones and laptops, and the router sits in the same room as the devices that matter, Wi-Fi 7 delivers something you can feel. If you are buying a router to fix coverage at the other end of a Victorian terrace, it will not help — that is a job for mesh or a wired access point, at any standard.

Where the money is better spent

An ethernet cable to the room that matters beats every wireless upgrade ever sold. A powerline adapter or a second access point fixes dead spots that no single router can reach through brick. Spend there first, and buy the router that covers your actual line speed rather than the badge.

Pricing

Wi-Fi 6 routers have fallen hard as Wi-Fi 7 arrived — capable models from the major brands now sit well under £80, and business-grade access points are often cheaper than consumer routers because they are sold without the marketing. Wi-Fi 7 remains at a premium that has not yet been competed away.