Streaming Breaks on Consistency, Not on Speed
A single 4K stream asks for somewhere between 15 and 25Mbps held steady. Almost every fibre line sold locally clears that many times over, which is why the box with the largest number on it rarely turns out to be the fix for an evening film that keeps stalling. Playback falters when packets arrive late or not at all, and the adaptive bitrate logic in the player answers by dropping resolution or pausing to refill its buffer.
The features worth weighing, then, are the ones that protect timing. Queue management, sold as smart queues, SQM or adaptive QoS, prevents a large upload or a game update from filling the buffer that video traffic has to pass through. Band steering and a clean 5GHz channel keep a television off the crowded 2.4GHz band. Wi-Fi 7 adds multi-link operation, which lets a capable client hold two bands simultaneously and move traffic when one degrades, so a microwave or a neighbour changing channel no longer produces a visible glitch.
One local detail matters if 6GHz capability is on your list. ICASA released the lower 6GHz range, 5,925 to 6,425MHz, for licence-exempt use and reaffirmed that position in its 2026 innovation spectrum regulations, so Wi-Fi 6E and Wi-Fi 7 equipment is legal here. The upper portion that some overseas reviews assume is not available, which limits how many very wide channels a router can lay down.
