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Comment by paxys | Hacker News Reader

It's rare to have multi-gigabit internet at one's home.

Basically no device out there supports WiFi 7.

Getting a WiFi 7 router for "future proofing" also makes no sense considering they cost $500+ right now and the price will come down by a lot.

TL;DR – no, you do not need it.

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Ubiquiti did come out with their U7 Pro which is only $189, which is really not bad considering their AC Pro is $149 and their U6 Pro is $159.

I ended up upgrading since I do now have a couple of Wifi 6E devices and I live in a very dense apartment building. The 6 GHz band has been crazy good! With the same laptop, with line of sight to the AP, I'll get 800 mbps on the 6 GHz band and 250 mbps on the 5 GHz.

The UniFi U7 Pro that I bought was ~$200. For that money, it upgraded my network from WiFi 6 to WiFi 7, so now the 6E devices that I have are noticeably faster (since I didn't have 6E before), and my network is future-proofed for WiFi 7. It seemed like an easy win for me, so I disagree with your assessment.

You also don't need multi-gigabit internet to have a NAS that you want to connect to over the local network.

You can get 6E router for <$100. Sure future proofing may be a valid argument in some cases, but the vast majority of users simply do not need to spend that extra money.

I checked Amazon, and the cheapest one I saw was ~$140, not <$100. I saw WiFi 6 (not 6E) options for <$100.

Spending $200 now means that I don't have to spend $140 now and $140 again in two to three years.

I wonder why many don't consider working with a lot of data off of a NAS that could benefit from the cleaner network setup. 6Ghz is also clearly helpful as an early adopter.

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