Announced at CES, the annual trade show currently being held in Las Vegas until January 12, the Wi-Fi Alliance consortium announced Wi-Fi 7, a new, faster standard for devices to connect to the internet.
For those unfamiliar, the Wi-Fi consortium has been improving the wireless standard ever since its introduction in 1997. If you’ve seen certain terms in the past such as 802.11n and 802.11ac when buying a router or a Mac, these were previous Wi-Fi standards.
WiFi 6E, introduced in 2020, has transfer speeds of up to 9 Gbps — this is what measures data transfer over a wireless network per second. Wi-Fi 7, however, blows that away with transfer speeds of up to 46 Gbps.
Essentially, this boils down to downloading and streaming video, games, and more at much faster speeds — as long as you have a wireless router in your home that supports this new standard.
It’s far too early to expect Wi-Fi 7 in any nearby upcoming Apple devices, such as Vision Pro — but it isn’t a stretch to assume that the rumored iPhone 16 Pro and Pro Max devices will come packed with the Wi-Fi 7 standard, allegedly coming later this year.
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It’s still hard to imagine that there was a time when wireless internet was thought of as a future reserved only for Star Trek. Yet now we’re at a point where speeds of up to 46 Gbps are overkill for many users who only want to watch the latest season of Slow Horses on Apple TV Plus.
Take gaming for instance — Virgin Media, an internet provider in the UK, reports that you only need 3Mbps at minimum in order to play a game over the internet. That’s only 1% of the potential speeds that Wi-Fi 7 is capable of!
So if you’re waiting for the best Wi-Fi routers to be available with Wi-Fi 7 — you may as well hold off and look at a Wi-Fi 6E version instead. If you don’t game and only occasionally stream video from your iPhone 15 Pro or MacBook Pro, your needs will still be more than fulfilled.
However, if you want the latest and greatest or you work from home and need the fastest speeds available, then looking at one of the next routers to support the standard might just be what you've been looking for. Or, you can enjoy an Apple TV Plus show at a much faster transfer speed — if that’s your bag.
