Testing Wi-Fi 7—Benchmarking the Fastest Wi-Fi Yet

While testing NETGEAR’s Nighthawk RS700S, I decided to compare Wi-Fi 7 speeds to the older standards. Why not, right? It’s always fun to see how the latest Wi-Fi standard improves upon previous ones. I stopped including Wi-Fi 5 in testing because it’s old as dirt, and you shouldn’t be using it in 2025 anyway.

If you’re not into the nitty-gritty down-the-rabbit-hole details, turn back now as I get deep into the numbers to show how Wi-Fi 7 is the best specification yet.

The devices used in testing

Here are the three devices I used to compare the three Wi-Fi specifications. The OnePlus 11 5G is insanely fast, with a maximum connection rate of 5,764Mbps, but the best link rate I could squeeze out of it was 5,187Mbps. The lower number means the router still uses 4096-QAM modulation but at a less efficient coding rate.

Below, I break down each device’s capabilities by Wi-Fi band:

The Wi-Fi 7 benchmarks

Keep in mind that the following numbers are based on single-device tests, so the speeds you get may be different. In other words, the more devices you add to a channel, the slower your speeds may become.

In this test, I wanted to show how grouping 16 channels to make one superwide bonded channel (320 MHz) delivers more throughput than combining just eight channels (160 MHz).

I hoped to squeeze more speed out of the OnePlus 11 5G since its max data rate is 5,764Mbps, but the best I could muster was a 5,187Mbps rate. After overhead, I landed a solid 3,684Mbps in real-world speed at close range. That’s crazy fast for a single device and more bandwidth than my current fiber internet plan.

Unfortunately, I couldn’t get the OnePlus 11 5G to connect to the Nighthawk RS700S using 160 MHz bonded channels on the 6 GHz band, so I don’t have an apples-to-apples comparison to see how Wi-Fi 7’s faster modulation delivers more data per second than Wi-Fi 6 using a 160 MHz bonded channel. Technically, the max link rate of the OnePlus 11 5G should be around 2,594Mbps, resulting in a real-world speed of 2,153Mbps at close range.

Since the OnePlus 11 5G refused to connect to the 6 GHz band using a 160 MHz channel width, I switched to 80 MHz instead. In this case, the router combines four channels into one.

Here you can see how Wi-Fi 7’s higher modulation compares to Wi-Fi 6: 4096-QAM versus 1024-QAM. I got a bit more throughput with Wi-Fi 7, but nothing requiring me to change my underpants.

Still, I must note my test results with the Pixel 6, especially at 120 feet. I usually see around 250Mbps in that spot, so I was a little surprised. Does this speed boost stem from how the router handles channel puncturing? Or how it reduces overhead? Apparently so, based on my testing with other Wi-Fi 7 routers and mesh systems.

This was an unfair battle from the start, but I wanted to show how doubling the channel width and increasing the modulation rate can really make a difference. I typically get around 1,700Mbps on average using a 160 MHz channel width and a Wi-Fi 6 device, so the increase in speed from Wi-Fi 7 and the new 4096-QAM modulation was a pleasant surprise.

The iPhone 12 Pro Max is built to handle 1,200Mbps max, so you’ll never see higher speeds than that. Add in the overhead associated with Wi-Fi and some of the iOS bloat going on behind the scenes, and 860Mbps is the typical average speed I get at close range with that phone. Still, I was surprised I didn’t see a slight increase in speed, as seen with the Pixel 6.

I sobbed alligator tears for the iPhone, so I narrowed the channel width to 80 MHz for a better apples-to-apples comparison (well, kind of). After testing many routers and mesh systems, I’ve come to discover that the iPhone isn’t the best device to test Wi-Fi speeds, but so many people use it that I felt obliged to include it in my tests. Its speeds match those I’ve seen in other router tests but fall behind the OnePlus and Pixel in this benchmark.

I expected to see higher numbers with the OnePlus 11 5G than the Pixel 6, but that didn’t happen. Both tested about the same despite their different starting link rates, which was a little surprising given the speed gaps between the two in my 2.4 GHz tests (shown in the next section). Overall, the results may be a case of fresh Android installs versus a not-so-fresh Apple iOS install.

In this test, I used the default router settings to see how my devices tested on the 2.4 GHz band. The router kept me locked to a single 20 MHz channel, so I didn’t see any of the speed benefits of channel bonding.

Again, I was pleasantly surprised with Wi-Fi 7. The OnePlus 11 5G really shined in this test, while my two Wi-Fi 6 phones didn’t see any real benefits. Note that the iPhone I used has a strange max limit (presumably to save battery), so it falls behind the Google 6 in throughput.

Once I disabled 20/40 coexistence, channel bonding kicked in to create a wireless 40 MHz one. The caveat to using 40 MHz is that the 2.4 GHz band is more crowded than Disney World on a hot day, so even if the router selects channel 5 as the primary, it may select the heavily used channel 1 as the secondary. That means you may not get the speeds you were hoping for.

The fastest link rate I saw with the OnePlus 11 5G was 619Mbps, but the rate jumped around so much that I was lucky to get 476Mbps in real-world speeds at close range. Still, that’s a far cry from the slower speeds seen with the iPhone 12 Pro Max and Pixel 6, which don’t even support 40 MHz channel widths.

Wi-Fi 7 routers and systems tested and reviewed

Here’s a list of all the Wi-Fi 7 standalone routers and mesh systems I’ve tested so far.