Question Any Benefit to upgrading my PC WiFi 6E adapter to WiFi7?

[Tiger4969]

I have a WiFi 7 Mesh Network (EERO) with 2 GB internet. I have a PC with Asus WiFi 6E adapter and get about 1400 Mbps that I use as a media hub for music and movies. I play music to my Sonos speakers quite a lot each day and sometimes the system is slow to respond. Am wondering if I would see any benefit to upgrading the PC adapter card or would that just benefit activity I do directly on the PC?

 

[bill001g]

Yes you can put wifi7 in in your signature and brag to all your fiends. You can post your speedtest screen shots to forums as a trophy

Key here to remember both on your wifi and your internet speed is high bandwidth only helps you download large data faster. You for example can download and install the 100gbyte microsoft flight simulator faster. How often do you do that in a day/week/month. How much are you paying per minute saved.

Almost every other internet application get no benefit at all to having more bandwidth. Something like watching 4k netflix uses 30mbit. Even having 100mbit does not change the way netflix uses bandwidth or affect how it functions. It will just leave the other 70mbit of bandwidth unused. Online games use even less maybe 1mbps and they too get no benefit to added bandwidth. Stuff like web surfing in theory might be slightly faster but unlike say a game download it is download massive amounts of extremely tiny files. The overhead is so massive that it can not actually more than a couple mbps.

In the end your average family does not need more than 100mbps unless they have some very unusual needs. That lets mulitple people watch different 4k netflix movies and play games etc and still have extra bandwidth. The ISP is laughing all the way to the bank they know very well most people do not need or use the large internet plans they sell.

In your case I strongly suspect the sonos speakers are going to be lucky if they support wifi5. They use so little bandwidth they can run on any form of wifi. The problem is if there is a lot of data loss do to interference you will hear that. The type of wifi you use makes little difference for interference. If there is radio energy coming from say your neigbors house it is going to scramble the bits no matter what.....in some way wifi7 is more suseptible because the data encoding is more complex and so is more easily damaged.

If you have slow response it is likely software related but it depends exactly what you are referring to. Web pages slow load is many times caused by DNS issues. I would change your router so it gives out 8.8.8.8 as the dns server rather than its own IP. The router by default act as a DNS proxy to the ISP DNS server, both tend to have strange issues from time to time.

 

[Tiger4969]

Ok, I understand what you are saying, but, I currently have 47 devices connected in my large house, and did notice a huge improvement when I upgraded to the WiFi 7 routers. I know other devices will not benefit if I upgrade the PC adapter, was just wondering it it goes to the 6 band maybe would help the other traffic. I did also get a huge benefit from WiFi 7 for watching movies from that PC through Plex on most of my tv’s. Last point is saw benefit when family is over - 12 kids/grandkids all with phones / iPads.

Thanks

 

[bill001g]

Hard to say I suspect it is all anecdotal. It should make no difference at all unless you are doing crazy stuff like trying to watch 4k uncompressed video that need gigbait or more speeds.

You can buy all the fancy routers you like but the end device is still half the connection. How many of your end devices support this fancy stuff. For example very few end devices have 4 antenna so the ability of a router to do 4x4 mimo is close to worthless. This is also the key reason wifi6 never really had much benefit. Sure in theory you can run 160mhz radio channels. The only way to do it though on the 5ghz radio band is to deal with the massive list of restrictions related to avoiding stuff like weather radar when you use radio bands outside the ones used when you use only 80mhz. Since this varies from country to country a lot of end device manufactures did not want to have to support this so they just called it wifi6 but only supported 80mhz which is same as wifi5.

Wifi6e though does have much more bandwidth on 6ghz. It does run much faster but that is only temporary I suspect. The key difference between wifi7 and wifi6e is wifi7 can attempt to use 320mhz radio channels. As wifi 7 grows and every person attempt to use 320mhz radio channels or more likely multiple blocks of 320 for all their silly mesh systems we are right back to massive over crowding. Right now the main reason wifi6e is so much faster is the vast majority of end devices do not function on 6ghz.

In the end the main difference between wifi7 and wifi6e is wifi7 can use 320mhz radio blocks. There are other difference but they make very little difference in real world installs.

 

[Eximo]

Newer routers have been adding multi-band and MIMO technologies, and beam forming I think. So the max devices connected can totally go up and avoid additional crosstalk which should help with latency.

I don't see that a single device would benefit too much on its own, but if you already have the router, won't hurt. Just your wallet a little.

 

[Tiger4969]

The adapters are cheap. What I do know is I had great improvement on all devices after upgrading the router to WiFi 7. It would be a cheap investment to see how well it will help or not.

 

[LordVile]

Ok, I understand what you are saying, but, I currently have 47 devices connected in my large house, and did notice a huge improvement when I upgraded to the WiFi 7 routers. I know other devices will not benefit if I upgrade the PC adapter, was just wondering it it goes to the 6 band maybe would help the other traffic. I did also get a huge benefit from WiFi 7 for watching movies from that PC through Plex on most of my tv’s. Last point is saw benefit when family is over - 12 kids/grandkids all with phones / iPads.

Thanks

Thing is you’ll only see a difference on the 6E devices because all of the 6E devices are now running on a channel that’s basically traffic free now because everything else is on the 2.4 and 5GHz bands. You wouldn’t really notice as much going to 7 from 6E as you have going to 6E from a crowded 5/6.

Ultimately if you want speed run a wire.