Walk through Best Buy this weekend and you'll find a wall of gleaming boxes promising "Wi-Fi 7" speeds, with price tags that start around $300 and climb past $700.
The pitch is compelling: multi-gigabit throughput, lower latency, a future-proof home network.
What the packaging doesn't tell you is that most Americans can't use any of it.
Wi-Fi 7's headline features require a fiber or cable connection faster than 1 gigabit, plus devices—phones, laptops, TVs—that contain Wi-Fi 7 chips.
The iPhone 15 and most Android flagships still run Wi-Fi 6E.
Your smart TV, your thermostat, your doorbell camera: all older standards.
Buying a Wi-Fi 7 router today is like paving a six-lane highway to a town where everyone still drives golf carts.
Router makers have spent two years pushing upgrades on consumers who bought Wi-Fi 6 hardware during the pandemic and haven't noticed a single problem since.
That's not a coincidence—it's a business model.
The average American household pays roughly $70 a month for internet service, and most of that bandwidth goes to streaming 1080p video and scrolling social media, tasks that a $60 router from 2019 handles fine.
People with multi-gig fiber plans, households running a dozen devices at once, and anyone doing serious work—video editing, large file transfers, competitive gaming—on a home network.
For everyone else, the honest advice is to wait.
Wi-Fi 7 devices will flood the market by late 2025, prices will fall, and the standard will actually matter.
Buying now means paying a premium to beta test hardware for a network that doesn't exist yet.
There's a broader issue here, and it's not really about routers.
It's about an economy that constantly invents reasons for ordinary people to spend money they don't have on problems they don't experience.
The router that promises a future your internet provider hasn't delivered.
Together, they add up to a quiet tax on households already stretched thin—and a growing pile of e-waste from devices abandoned before they ever hit their limits.
None of this is a knock on the technology itself.
Wi-Fi 7 is genuinely better, and in a few years it'll be the baseline.
The question is whether you need to be first in line for something that won't change your daily life.
Our take: skip the upgrade this year, put the $400 toward your internet bill, and let the early adopters pay for the privilege of debugging it.
Final Thoughts
Your old router is doing more than you think.