A 2 part statement/question: I see these fancy new routers offering wifi 6,6e and 7 that support 10GB of speed per port ect… I don’t get how my 500mbs internet plan will be 50% faster (according to google) with a new router. Also I am unaware of any ISP providing 10GB of internet for standard consumers.
In: Technology
It won’t be. It’s misleading advertising.
You’ll get faster rates _to your router_ (potentially) but you’re still capped at the rates your router can handle (both wired throughout and cpu cycles) as well as what your ISP is providing.
In your case you’ll get 500Mbps _to the router_ and at best 500Mbps to your devices (wired) or less wirelessly
The advantages of 6/6e/7 end up being more about things like MU-MIMO and essentially better support for multiple devices simultaneously, at the trade off of less range (the higher the frequency, ie 2.4 to 5 to 6Ghz the less the range)
The idea I’ve heard is that you generally don’t get 100% of your WiFi advertised speeds. So let’s say your WiFi is 500 but your connection is only getting 60%. Your speeds are slower than your internet. But if your WiFi is 10gig and you only get 60% it’s maxed.
Still probably overkill for most people.
The 10gig ports would be for your internal network which if you are willing to spend enough you could utilize. Still overkill.
There are non internet speed related advantages. Network speed doesn’t only refer to internet usage.
For example, if you have multiple devices connected they will communicate to each other at those hyper speeds. A good example is local network streaming. If you have a server with movies on it or one just used for storage, other devices can pull from those at the high speeds.
If you wanted to stream a steam game from your gaming pc to a laptop or phone, you will use the higher speeds up to the theoretical maximum of those devices (depending what wifi type they support).
Well if you’re not already getting 500 Mbps then it’ll almost certainly be faster, but if you’re already at 500 Mbps on wifi then of course you can’t increase that by 50%, google has no idea what actual speeds YOU are getting it’s just using generic tests that ideally will make it look as worthwhile to upgrade as possible.
Wifi 7 would allow using multiple bands to download, and it’s better when you have lots of devices like smart switches or other home automation stuff.
There are other countries than the US where 10Gig is almost certainly a thing, and perhaps there are 1-2 services in the US that offer 10Gig just perhaps not in your area. But creating the hardware allows the ISPs to offer 10Gig down the road.
The speed is useful between devices within your home, not necessarily to and from the internet.
If you don’t have a file server in your home you probably won’t see any meaningful benefit at all.
The other major purpose of some of the more recent WiFi standards is lower latency, which is useful for things like broadcasting VR from a PC to a headset. In that case you want updates of relatively small amounts of data (individual frames) to reach the headset as quickly as possible, so the visuals are as smooth as possible.
they aren’t really related.
Think of these as pipes. you have a 500mb pipe going to the internet, you have a 10,000mb (10gb) pipe for your wifi devices.
The large wifi pipe is shared amongst all your devices, so 10 devices means you have 1000mb of pipe capacity per device on average if every device uses the large pipe at the same volume.
but at the end, _all_ the devices share the same 500mb pipe to the internet.
Each individual wifi device has the potential to flood the small internet pipe, but they only share the faster speed between other uses of the larger pipe at the higher capacity.
The real advantage of newer WiFi protocols is that you’ll get less local congestion and less local jitter (spikes in latency). Here’s a video I made showing [how WiFi congestion affects your jitter](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bYrukFoicto). Jitter is a much bigger problem for video conferencing or twitch gaming. Video conferencing at most needs 1 to 6 Mbps. Gaming typically uses around 0.1 to 0.3 Mbps but it’s extremely sensitive to high ping times caused by jitter.
The most important thing is that you get the WiFi router close enough that it’s less affected by signal fade or interference. You also want to pick a channel that your neighbors are not using. Using a narrower channel will lower your max speed to 150 Mbps but it can improve your stability and jitter.
Devices inside your network can communicate with eachother wirelessly a lot faster. Do you have a Quest VR headset? or any other wireless devices?
The only thing that would improve would be the devices on your same WiFi
So like, screen casting from your phone to your tv.
But your connection to the rest of the internet would be whatever your ISP caps you at.
The high speed is what you get for connections between your device and your router.
if the connection between your router and your ISP is much slower you won’t be able to connect to the internet at higher speeds.
A chain is only as strong as its weakest link and any network connection only has as much bandwidth as the part of the connection with the least bandwidth.
If you can connect with your computer to your router at a high bandwidth, but the connection between your router and your ISP is very slow, that means your connection from your device over your router to the ISP will be slow.
Even if both the connection to your router from your device and from your router to the ISP is fast, if the actual server you are connecting to has a low bandwidth available to connect to you over your ISP, you will be limited by that.
There is limited benefit for you for upgrading a link in the chain that is not the weakest.
However your router at home does offer some benefits if it has a faster network connection. You don’t just connect your device with it to the internet, you can also connect different devices in your home with it, so you can in theory move data between different devices connected to it at very high speeds as long as all devices in question support those speeds.
It probably won’t come up often unless you need to copy very large files from one very new laptop to another very new laptop in your home wlan very quickly, but the use case is there in theory at least.
And if nothing else it means your router is future proof and won’t be the weakest link if everything else catches up.
Latest Answers