Oliver Haslam on November 18, 2025, 6:14 pm

Testing Shows iPhone 17’s N1 Chip Boosts Wi-Fi 7 Speeds

Apple’s new iPhone 17, iPhone 17 Pro, iPhone Pro Max, and iPhone Air devices all use a new Apple-designed N1 wireless chip. And new figures show that all of these phones sport faster Wi-Fi connectivity than their predecessors.

Prior iPhones used Qualcomm chips that handled wireless networking, but this year saw Apple move to chips designed by its own teams.

Now, Ookla, the company behind speedtest.net, says that the switch-up has given the new iPhones a significant Wi-Fi speed boost.

Apple’s N1 chipset is a substantial upgrade. The iPhone 17 family delivers a clear step-change in Wi-Fi performance vs. the Broadcom-based iPhone 16 lineup, with faster download and upload speeds across every region. Globally, median download and upload speeds on the N1 were each up to 40% higher than on its predecessor.

This upgrade means that the new iPhones are neck and neck with the Google Pixel 10 Pro in terms of wireless data transfer performance. Ookla says that “the iPhone 17 family leads globally with 56.08 Mbps, just ahead of the Pixel 10 Pro family at 53.25 Mbps.”

Apple’s N1 chip integrates Wi-Fi 7, Bluetooth 6, and Thread radios into a single component, Ookla notes. Notably, the N1 is also “capped at 160 MHz channels and lacks support for 320 MHz operation.”

That should, in theory, hamper its performance in markets where the full 6GHz band is available — like the United States. That, however, doesn’t appear to be the case.