Apple’s iPhone 17 lineup is seeing some major real-world Wi-Fi speed gains, Ookla confirmed this week. (Editors’ note: Ookla is owned by Ziff Davis, ExtremeTech’s parent company.) By crowdsourcing Speedtest data from users around the world, the network intelligence firm has found that the iPhone 17 family almost universally sees 40% faster download and upload speeds than the iPhone 16 lineup.
In North America, download speeds on this year’s iPhones reached an average of 416 Mbps, up from 323 Mbps on the iPhone 16. These improvements appear to hold true in tough environments, like busy networks or when connecting from rooms further from the router.
The new iPhones—the iPhone 17, iPhone 17 Pro, and iPhone Air—achieve wireless connectivity via Apple’s own N1 chip, while previous models used Broadcom hardware. Although the N1 chip supports the new Wi-Fi 7 standard, it only lets the iPhone use a 160MHz channel width. Some competitors support the 320MHz band, but Ookla says this doesn’t matter much, since many routers still lack these wider bands.
Credit: Ookla
The iPhone 17 lineup has even delivered faster Wi-Fi speeds than the latest Samsung flagships from the S25 series. The former’s median download speed is around 80 Mbps higher than the latter’s.
Beyond Wi-Fi, the N1 chip also offers Bluetooth and Thread capabilities. Apple says the chip manages to provide these speed gains without sacrificing energy efficiency.