A lot can happen in the world of Wi‑Fi in just three years. When I last talked about upgrading my home lab to 6 GHz, Wi‑Fi 6E was at the bleeding edge. Today, the landscape has shifted entirely. With Wi‑Fi 7 now in the wild, I’ve completely overhauled my home lab to test the throughput and multi‑link operation (MLO) capabilities of the next generation of Wi‑Fi.

In this post, I’m pulling back the curtain on my current Wi‑Fi 7 home lab—from the 10 Gbps backbone to the latest MacBook Pro M5, along with specialised Wi‑Fi 7 clients such as the Ubiquiti UDB switch. If you’d like to see these speeds in action, check out the full video below, or keep scrolling for a deep dive into the hardware and topology behind the lab.

Below is the current topology for my Wi‑Fi 7 testing lab, which now includes access points from Cisco, Arista, and Ubiquiti.
From a client perspective, the lab consists of a mix of desktops, laptops, and dedicated test devices, allowing me to evaluate Wi‑Fi 7 performance across multiple chipsets and form factors:
1. A Dell desktop equipped with a Qualcomm FastConnect‑based Herald BE PCIe adapter & Intel BE200‑based PCIe adapter.
2. Several USB Wi‑Fi 7 adapters, including:
– Netgear Nighthawk A9000 (MediaTek chipset)
– Comfast BE6500 (Realtek chipset)
3. WLANPi M4+ with Intel BE200 adapter
4. Pixel 8 Phone
5. iPhone 16 Pro
6. Apple Macbook Pro (M5)
7. Ubiquiti UDB Switch (Wi-Fi 7 client + switch)

For packet capture and analysis mostly I use Meraki PCAP and a WLAN Pi running an Intel BE200 adapter, dedicated to single‑channel PCAP capture (With AirTool2 on Macbook). Refer this post for different method of wireless PCAP.

If you watched my video, you may have noticed that without upgrading my home Ubiquiti setup to 10 Gbps, there’s little value in testing the UDB switch’s MLO performance. With MLMR‑STR capability, it is possible to achieve speeds over 5 Gbps throughput (with data rate of 5.8 Gbps + 2.8 Gbps) when using 320 MHz channels in the 6 GHz band together with 160 MHz channels in the 5 GHz band, which would otherwise be constrained by the existing uplink

I will share those details as I upgrade my home lab in coming weeks.