From 400 Mbps to 1.7 Gbps: A WiFi 7 Debugging Journey

> Set transmit power to High

Do NOT do this if you live in a densely populated area (e.g. apartment complex). You'll create noise for yourself and everybody else. Classic prisoner's dilemma - a few people could be assholes and profit from it, but if everyone's an asshole everybody suffers.

General rule on TX power: start on low and increase only if you know (or can confirm) it helps. Go back down if it doesn't.

Went through a similar tuning process with Wi-Fi 6 on OpenWRT recently: https://taoofmac.com/space/reviews/2025/09/14/1630

In my case, I forgot I had to change encryption type to associate at higher speeds.

I'm lazy so I just fire off the occasional speed tests using Ookla.

It doesn't _really_ seem to matter what channel width or frequency I use, I tend to get around 600Gbps from my iPhone (17, pro).

When you make it a point to ensure you're on the correct AP, line of sight from a few feet away, sometimes I break 1Gbps. I was surprised, watching TV the other day, to randomly get a 1.2Gbps speedtest which is one of the faster ones I've seen on WiFi.

(10gbps internet, UDM Pro, UDM enterprise 2.5Gbps switch for clients, PoE WiFi 7 APs on 6ghz).

Honestly, I'd say overall 6ghz has been more trouble than it's worth. Flipping the switch to WPA2/3 as required by 6ghz broke _all_ of my clients last year, so I had to revert and now I just have a separate SSID for clients I have the energy to manually retype the password into. 6Ghz pretty much only works line of sight and from a handful of feet away. There were bugs last year in Apple's "Disable 6e" setting so it kept re-enabling itself. MLO was bad, so it would stick to 6ghz even when there was basically no usable signal.

Over the course of the past year, it's gotten pretty tolerable, but sometimes I still wonder why I bother-- I'm pretty sure my real world performance would be better if I just turned 6ghz off again.

It's wasted effort in the US, since the 2025 budget bill directs the FCC to sell off much of the 6GHz band on which WiFi 7 depends.

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/07/trump-and-congre...

> I recently upgraded from a UniFi Dream Machine to a UniFi Dream Router 7

What do these devices do that can't be accomplished by an OpenWrt One + an external AP for less money and fully FOSS?

Another option would be a mini-PC running Linux, but it's perhaps overkill for a domestic router.

Edit: Actually the OpenWrt One does have built-in WiFi, so you don't even need the external AP.

(TLDR: if you want to use bleeding edge technology you must use bleeding edge drivers and firmware blobs)

We have tested WiFi-7 gear in our lab: from the cheapest TP Omada EAP783 to the latest most expensive Cisco AP+Controller.

Our findings:

- Driver quality from the modems is still below average on Linux. If you want to test Wifi-7 go with the Intel BE200 card - most stuff works there. Warning: this card does not work with AMD CPUs.

- We have seen quite a bit of problems from Qualcomm and Mediatek cards. Either latency issues, weirdo bugs on 6GHz (not showing all SSIDs) or throughput problems

- Always go with the latest kernel with the freshest firmware blobs

- MLO is difficult to get running properly. Very buggy from all sides. Also needs the latest version of wpa_supplicant - otherwise it will not come up. And be aware: there are several MLO modes and not all of them offer "two links for twice the bandwidth".

Also expect to hit problems from AP side. If you read the TP Omada firmware changelogs you see that they are still struggling with a lot of basic functionality. So keep them updated to the latest beta versions too.

I use a Qualcomm QCNCM865 in my privat setup with an AMD CPU. Feels like the latest firmware blobs and kernel drivers brought stability into their components.

> Running iperf server on the router itself creates CPU contention between the WiFi scheduling and the iperf process. The router’s TCP stack isn’t tuned for this either. Classic mistake.

Can you elaborate on this? I don't know much about WiFi so I'm curious what CPU work the router needs to do and what wouldn't be offloaded to hardware somehow (like most routing/forwarding/QoS duties can be).

the 2.5Gbit USB network adapters using Realtek driver are actually bugged on macOS and only max out at 1.9Gbit/sec or so. Sadly the solution has been to use non-realtek 2.5Gbit adapters or simply get the 5Gbit Realtek ones that sell for almost the same price.

There are times when low power is better, because it allows the router to ignore far away clients.

In simple terms, far away = more work to communicate = more airtime = less throughput.

It probably only matters with multiple devices.

I had a similar issue but on unifi gateway lite after upgrading to 1gig fibre, I couldn't get above about 250-300mbps, even wired. Everything looked good in the unifi app. Turns out in the unifi web UI there was a "use hardware acceleration" checkbox for the gateway that was unticked and not even visible in the app. Ticked that and now I am getting 900+mbps

I also sometimes have alerts saying more than one device is using the same IP address (DHCP issues) but it won't tell me which ones! At least give me the MAC addresses!

Unifi's stuff is great, but the software is sometimes infuriating.

The wifi bottleneck is such a tragedy. We'd otherwise have 10G home broadband probably.

Just checked mine...getting exactly gigabit speeds. Weird because everything should be on 2.5.

Guess I need to do some debugging of my own

6Ghz for me causes random latency increases every 10 seconds or so, just had to stop using it because it drives me crazy

I get 1.6 Gbps line-of-sight no trouble with my U7 Pro, but I haven't managed to get MLO working. My only device with MLO support is the iPhone 16 Pro Max, and it refuses to connect to an SSID with MLO turned on...

I brought my WiFi 7-capable ASUS RT-BE96U to Germany (from China) and I proudly notice that my average download speed is up to ~105 Mbit from ~95 Mbit with the stock Vodafone router.

"Silicon Valley of Europe", my a*s.

Why do people need 2.5Gbps internet access or 1.7 Gbps on a home wifi network? What are folks doing at home?!?

Running $60 Mikrotik HEX S 2025 and getting 1.2 Gbps on a “1G” connection !