Another day, another spec sheet designed to make your current setup feel like a rusty lawnmower.
The WiFi Alliance officially flipped the switch on WiFi 7 certification, which means every networking brand on earth is now shoving "BE" model numbers in your face like a timeshare salesman at an airport.
Here's the pitch: WiFi 7 promises multi-link operation, 4K QAM, and theoretical speeds up to 46 Gbps.
That's roughly 4.6 times faster than the WiFi 6E router you bought eighteen months ago and never fully configured.
Remember when you were excited about that?
The catch, because there's always a catch, is that basically none of your devices can use it yet.
The iPhone 15 Pro and a handful of Samsung Galaxy S24 models support WiFi 7.
It's still buffering in WiFi 5 and loving it.
So you'd be buying a Formula 1 car to drive to the end of your driveway.
That's why they're pricing these things like they come with a free pony.
The TP-Link Archer BE800 launched at $599.
Netgear's Orbi 970 mesh system starts around $1,700 for a three-pack.
Asus wants $499 for the ROG Rapture GT-BE98.
These are real prices for hardware that mostly talks to itself in an empty stadium of compatible gadgets.
Meanwhile, the actual bottleneck in your house isn't the router.
It's the coax cable, the ISP throttling you during peak hours, and the fact that your roommate is torrenting nine seasons of a show nobody watches.
A $600 router won't fix a $60 internet plan.
People with multi-gig fiber plans, a house full of WiFi 7 phones, and a burning need to transfer 8K video files between rooms for reasons that remain unclear.
If that's you, godspeed, you magnificent bandwidth gremlin.
The smarter play is to sit tight until late 2025 or 2026, when WiFi 7 chips land in midrange routers and your next phone and laptop both support it out of the box.
Early adoption is a hobby, not a strategy.
Let the enthusiasts pay the tax this round.
Our take: WiFi 7 is genuinely great technology wrapped in a genuinely terrible time to buy it.
Unless you've got fiber, compatible devices, and money to burn, your current router is fine.
Final Thoughts
The internet will still be slow, and it won't be the router's fault.