Customers and enterprises should treat vendor MLO claims skeptically and demand transparency, because real‑world performance may fall short of advertised gains—affecting purchasing decisions and network planning—while Wi‑Fi 7’s other improvements still justify upgrades for many use cases.
Independent testing by Canadian site Ratings found that many Wi‑Fi 7 routers' flagship feature—multi‑link operation (MLO)—is frequently overstated in marketing and often functions more like basic load‑balancing than true simultaneous link aggregation. While the hardware in some devices supports multi‑band connections across 2.4, 5 and 6 GHz, manufacturers’ software implementations frequently fail to deliver full MLO performance, aggregating weak links and reducing overall throughput. The report notes that some routers might gain fuller MLO via future firmware or hardware revisions, but such fixes could increase cost and power draw. Despite the MLO shortcomings, Wi‑Fi 7 still brings tangible benefits—wider 320 MHz channels, improved OFDMA, higher QAM and better interference handling.
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