Windows 11 now adds support for Wi-Fi 7, those who want to use the much-improved wireless standard will no doubt be pleased to know, but it's currently only in testing.
This is despite the fact that Wi-Fi 7 routers already exist and the standard has been officially finalized by the Wi-Fi Alliance (in fact, the Wi-Fi Certified 7 program was announced in early January 2024).
As you can imagine, it will be some time before official Wi-Fi 7 support comes to the release build of Windows 11, as it will need to move through the testing channels first.
Right now, it's only on the Canary test channel (the oldest) with build 26063, a preview that flew a bit under the radar, but is important in this regard. However, it was also added for dev channel testers, as Microsoft informed us in the regular blog post about build 26063 (as noted by XDA Developers).
As the software giant also noted, Wi-Fi 7 (aka 802.11be) is on the order of 4 times faster than Wi-Fi 6 and more like 6 times faster than Wi-Fi 5.
If you want to know more about how this new wireless standard is making leaps and bounds (and it's not just about raw speed, although that is, of course, very important), check out our guide on the pros and cons of Wifi 7.
Analysis: wireless party
To be fair to Microsoft, while it seems like it's pretty late to the wireless party, and Wi-Fi 7 may have officially kicked off (at least in some countries, including the US, Australia, and the UK), it still It's early for the standard.
The standard may be effectively set in stone now, but that doesn't mean there won't be adjustments in the future. Inevitably, there will be firmware updates for existing Wi-Fi 7 routers to fix or tweak things in the future as needed, although all the important cogs in terms of features are already in place.
Windows 11 is one of the last pieces of the puzzle to be added for Wi-Fi 7 support and then Wi-Fi 7 laptops. And of course, as mentioned, you'll need a Wi-Fi 7 router to to benefit. from faster wireless speeds. (It should be noted that those devices are also expensive right now, although that's usually true for any cutting-edge technology.)
With Wi-Fi 7 we are getting performance that makes wireless online gaming a reality in terms of performance close to wired (Ethernet) performance and certainly much better than other PC devices that do not connect directly to the router ( such as powerline adapters, which can be notoriously defective in some scenarios).
What about Windows 10 compatibility with Wi-Fi 7? We're still not sure about it, although the last we heard was that it's coming, but there's no sign of that yet.
