What do wifi 5, 6 and 7 actually mean?

Router marketing sells headline speeds that no home connection can supply. Understanding which problem each generation actually solves saves buying the wrong thing.

Step by step

1. Separate the two numbers you will be shown.Broadband speed is what arrives at your house. Wifi speed is how fast the router can talk to a device in the same room. A wifi figure far above your broadband speed changes nothing about your internet.
2. Understand the bands before the versions.2.4GHz travels further and passes through walls but is slower and crowded. 5GHz is much faster and quieter but absorbed by masonry. 6GHz, on newer routers, is faster and emptier again with even less reach.
3. Read wifi 5 as the older standard most equipment still uses.Perfectly adequate for a couple of people streaming. Its weakness is many devices at once, where it serves them one at a time and everything feels sluggish.
4. Read wifi 6 and 6E as 'handles a crowd better'.The genuine improvement is efficiency with lots of devices — the flat with thirty connected things, not the single laptop. 6E adds the 6GHz band.
5. Read wifi 7 as more of the same, plus using bands together.Real, but only if both the router and the device support it, and mostly noticeable at close range. Very few households are limited by this today.
6. Check what your devices support before buying.A wifi 7 router talking to a five-year-old phone communicates at the phone's standard. Upgrading the router alone changes nothing for old devices.
7. Diagnose the actual complaint before spending.Slow everywhere, including next to the router, is usually the broadband line. Fine near the router and poor far away is coverage. Fine alone and poor when the house is busy is the case a newer router genuinely fixes.
8. Prefer coverage over speed for most homes.A mesh system or a single ethernet cable to a far room solves the common household complaint far more reliably than a faster router in the same cupboard.

Tips

• Many smart plugs, bulbs and cameras only support 2.4GHz. If a gadget refuses to join, that is usually why.
• Most modern routers present one network name and pick the band per device. Leaving that alone is usually right; splitting bands is a fix for a specific problem, not an upgrade.
• If your provider's router is more than about five years old, replacing it is often more useful than adding an extender to it.

Common mistakes

• Buying a faster router to fix a weak signal upstairs — The limit is walls and distance, not the router's maximum speed. The signal is weak at that distance whatever version is printed on the box.
• Comparing the router's advertised speed with your broadband speed — They measure different things. A router quoting several thousand megabits is describing the air between it and a device standing next to it, not your line.

If it doesn't work

Questions people ask