November 1, 2025
Gigabits, Gripes & the Wi‑Fi 7 War
From 400 Mbps to 1.7 Gbps: A WiFi 7 Debugging Journey
One tiny router setting fixed the speed—but the comments turned into a neighbor showdown
TLDR: A simple router radio tweak—from 80 MHz to 160 MHz—took Wi‑Fi 7 speeds from 400 Mbps to around 1.7 Gbps. Comments exploded into a battle over blasting transmit power, hidden settings, and whether anyone needs multi‑gig internet at home, making this a cautionary tale about both configs and courtesy.
A Wi‑Fi 7 flex turned into a speed soap opera: the author went from a sad 400 Mbps to a blazing 1.7 Gbps after discovering the router’s 6 GHz radio was secretly stuck at 80 MHz instead of 160. The fix? Manually set the radio width and crank the transmit power—cue the comment war. Some cheered the win; others yelled “don’t be that neighbor.” One user warned, “Do NOT set transmit power to High in apartments,” calling it a prisoner’s dilemma where everyone loses if they blast their signal. Another camp debated testing methods: nerds argued whether running the speed test app on the router steals its brainpower, while curious onlookers asked what CPU magic routers actually do. The practical crowd chimed in with a gotcha: there’s a hidden “hardware acceleration” checkbox in UniFi’s web dashboard (not the app) that can unlock speeds—classic “there’s a switch for that.” Meanwhile, jokesters teased an iPhone hitting “600Gbps” (typo), turning it into a “NASA phone” meme and reminding folks to use Speedtest responsibly. The most fiery debate? “Why do you even need 2.5 Gbps at home?” Streaming, backups, and bragging rights all made cameos. Tech fix achieved, but the comments became the real performance test.
Key Points
- •Wired tests showed ~950 Mbps via a 1 Gbps switch and ~2.3 Gbps to the UDR7’s 2.5 Gbps port, confirming a solid backbone.
- •Initial WiFi 7 (6 GHz, 160 MHz) tests near the router delivered only ~400 Mbps, rising to ~650 Mbps with multiple iperf3 streams.
- •Running the iperf3 server on the router caused CPU contention and suboptimal TCP behavior, depressing throughput.
- •Client diagnostics revealed the phone connected at 80 MHz channel width (1.20 Gbps PHY), despite SSID set to 160 MHz.
- •Fixing the radio settings on the UDR7 to explicitly use 160 MHz (and increasing TX power) addressed the misconfiguration.