Walk into any electronics shop in Nairobi and the router boxes are covered in numbers — WiFi 6, WiFi 6E, and now WiFi 7, each promising speeds in the thousands of megabits. It’s natural to wonder whether the router you already have is holding you back. Sometimes it is. Often, it isn’t. Here’s a plain-language guide to what each generation actually changes, and how to tell whether an upgrade will make a real difference in your home.
First, what the numbers mean
A few years ago the WiFi industry switched from technical names like 802.11ac and 802.11ax to simple generation numbers. The ones you’ll see on shelves today are:
- WiFi 5 (802.11ac) — the standard in most routers from the last several years. Still perfectly capable for many homes.
- WiFi 6 (802.11ax) — built mainly for busy networks. Its biggest improvement isn’t raw speed, it’s handling lots of devices at once more efficiently.
- WiFi 6E — WiFi 6 with access to a brand-new band of radio spectrum at 6 GHz, on top of the familiar 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz bands.
- WiFi 7 (802.11be) — the newest generation, adding wider channels and the ability for a device to use more than one band at the same time.
WiFi 6: the one that helps busy homes
The average home now has far more connected devices than it did a few years ago — phones, laptops, a smart TV or two, security cameras, maybe a games console. Older routers tend to serve these devices one after another, so a crowded network can start to feel sluggish even when the internet connection itself is fine. WiFi 6 is designed to talk to several devices at once and manage their turns more efficiently, which is why it tends to feel smoother in a full house during the evening rush.
WiFi 6E and the 6 GHz band in Kenya
The 6 GHz band that WiFi 6E and WiFi 7 use is quieter than 5 GHz simply because far fewer devices are on it yet. Kenya’s Communications Authority has opened the lower part of the 6 GHz band (5925–6425 MHz) for licence-exempt WiFi use, so 6E routers can legitimately use it here. The catch: 6 GHz signals travel even less far through walls than 5 GHz, and only newer phones and laptops support it. It shines in the same room or the next one — not three walls away.
WiFi 7: impressive, but mostly future-proofing for now
WiFi 7’s headline features — much wider channels and “multi-link” connections that combine bands — are genuinely clever, and the speed figures on the box are real under ideal lab conditions. But you only benefit when your phone or laptop also supports WiFi 7, and most devices in Kenyan homes today don’t yet. For the majority of households, a WiFi 7 router right now is an investment in the next few years rather than an instant upgrade.
The part the box doesn’t tell you
A router can only share out the internet that reaches it. If your package is 20 Mbps, a router advertising several thousand megabits won’t make a speed test on your phone read any higher — the connection into your home is still the limit. What a better router can do is make sure that 20 Mbps actually reaches every room and gets shared fairly between devices, instead of being lost to weak signal and congestion inside the house.
So, should you upgrade?
- Probably yes if your router is WiFi 4 or older, drops devices regularly, or struggles when everyone is home in the evening.
- Consider WiFi 6 if you have lots of devices and the slowdown is inside the house rather than on your connection — it’s now the sensible, affordable middle ground.
- Look at 6E or 7 if you’re buying new flagship phones and laptops anyway and want a router that will keep up with them for years.
- Don’t bother yet if everything works well and a wired speed test matches your package — the router isn’t your bottleneck.
A quick way to check: run a speed test on a laptop plugged into the router with a cable, then again over WiFi in the room where things feel slow. If the wired result matches your package and the WiFi one doesn’t, the problem is inside your home, not your connection.
Not sure whether it’s your router, your package, or your coverage? Give us a call on 0702 447 334 or get in touch here — our 24/7 support team will help you figure out what’s actually slowing you down before you spend money on new hardware.