Image: Ookla
Canada is trailing behind in the race to adopt Wi-Fi 7, according to new data from Ookla. Despite Wi-Fi 7 routers being commercially available for more than a year now, Canadian adoption remains sluggish — sitting at just 0.6% of Speedtest samples in Q1 2025.
“Wi-Fi 7 adoption in Canada is roughly one-third of the rate in the U.S.,” said Ookla. In the U.S., cable giant Spectrum began bundling Wi-Fi 7 routers with its plans back in November 2024. In contrast, Rogers just started offering Wi-Fi 7 routers last week, claiming to be the first in Canada — and only with one plan in select cities.
According to Ookla, this delay isn’t just about consumer demand. In the U.S., 71% of households get their routers from their ISP. That makes ISP action, like Rogers’ move, critical in accelerating Wi-Fi 7 growth here at home.
The performance benefits of Wi-Fi 7 are clear, though nuanced. Across Canada’s major ISPs, Wi-Fi 7 isn’t always the fastest. Wi-Fi 6E, which uses only the 6 GHz band, actually outpaced Wi-Fi 7 in median download speeds across all providers (885 Mbps vs. 763 Mbps). That’s partly because Wi-Fi 7 also uses the slower 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz bands.
Image: Ookla
Still, Wi-Fi 7 offers faster speeds, wider coverage, and more stable connections on devices that support it. The standard also introduces major technological improvements, such as Multi-Link Operation (MLO), which allows data to travel across multiple bands simultaneously for better performance.
Fibre ISPs like Bell and TELUS continue to lead in upload speeds and latency across Wi-Fi generations, with Ookla noting that “fibre is much faster in the uplink and much quicker in latency than cable across all Wi-Fi generations.”
Interestingly, customer satisfaction improves with each Wi-Fi generation. Average Speedtest user ratings jumped from just 2.7 stars for Wi-Fi 4 to 4.6 stars for Wi-Fi 7.
For now, though, Canada’s Wi-Fi 7 progress remains slow. “More awareness, better education, and technology transparency will help realize the potential of Wi-Fi 7,” concluded Ookla.
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I think wifi 7 is a bit overrated. Wifi 6E offered a much bigger jump (almost double the throughput) compared to wifi 6, but wifi 7 only modest improvements. MLO is perhaps the worst feature, as sending data over the slow 2.4Ghz band actually greatly increases latency. It’s better just to turn MLO off as in most cases it just worsens performance.
Especially as Apple devices don’t support 320 MHz channel width on wifi 7 currently, there really is no benefit to wifi 7 at this point for Apple users. Perhaps as later Apple devices begin to support the 320 MHz channel width, it will be more useful. But not today.
Also wifi 7 routers are expensive than wifi 6E.