Following on from my Wi‑Fi 7 Home Lab post, I’ve upgraded parts of my lab environment to remove the 1 Gbps bottleneck I previously had. The home Wi‑Fi 7 access point remains the U7 Pro, which is equipped with an mGig port capable of up to 2.5 Gbps. In this post, I take a closer look at the performance of the latest UDB client within this setup. If you prefer video over text, you can also watch the accompanying video instead of reading the full post.

This is my current lab setup, where the UniFi backbone has been upgraded to 10 Gbps. However, I’m still using U7 Pro access points, which are equipped with a 2.5 Gbps mGig Ethernet port. As a result, this port becomes the primary limiting factor when running speed tests.

The access points are configured with 160 MHz channels in the 6 GHz (with 17dBm Tx power) band and 80 MHz channels in the 5 GHz band (with 14dBm Tx power). Theoretically, this configuration should provide a combined data rate of approximately 4.2 Gbps between the UDB switch and the Wi‑Fi 7 APs (based on 2.8 Gbps + 1.4 Gbps, as referenced from mcsindex.net).

From the UDB switch side, you do not have control over the Wi‑Fi 7 radio transmit or receive power. The radios operate at 16 dBm on the 6 GHz band and 23 dBm on the 5 GHz band. To determine the EIRP from the client’s perspective (24dBm & 31dBm), you need to add the antenna gain—8 dBi—to these transmit power values.

Both iPerf3 and OpenSpeedTest measured upload speeds of around 2.3 Gbps (from the UDB switch perspective). However, the download speed was unexpectedly limited to approximately 1.1 Gbps. At this stage, it’s not clear what caused this limitation—it could be related to the Windows client, the UDB switch, or another component in the setup.

More testing is planned. Before running those tests, I intend to upgrade the U7 Pro to a 10 Gbps‑capable U7 Pro XG. This upgrade will allow me to test the maximum potential of the UDB switch using 320 MHz channels in the 6 GHz band and 160 MHz channels in the 5 GHz band. While this configuration isn’t practical for a real‑world production environment, it’s perfectly reasonable in a lab setting to understand the platform’s maximum capabilities.