Wi-Fi 7 mesh systems

The 6 GHz backhaul trade-off

Wi-Fi 7's speed advantage lives on the 6 GHz band — it's where 320 MHz channels exist. On a mesh system, 6 GHz is also the obvious choice for dedicated backhaul, because it's clean spectrum with a lot of room.

It can't always be both. A tri-band Wi-Fi 7 mesh that reserves 6 GHz for node-to-node traffic gives you excellent backhaul and leaves your devices on 2.4 and 5 GHz — which is to say, Wi-Fi 6 speeds with a Wi-Fi 7 price. Quad-band systems exist precisely to resolve this, with a second 6 GHz or dedicated backhaul radio, and they cost accordingly.

MLO changes the calculation again, since a node can use two links at once for backhaul rather than reserving a whole radio. Check the radio table and the MLO flag on each product page rather than the band count alone.

As always with mesh, wired backhaul beats all of this and makes the question moot. See the mesh systems guide for the general case.