Microsoft isn’t set to end support for Windows 10 until 2025, but users now have a reason to upgrade to Windows 11 sooner than that. That’s because new Intel documents have leaked, revealing that support for Wi-Fi 7 will not be available for Windows 10. This means that Windows users will need to upgrade to Windows 11 if they want to take advantage of new Wi-Fi 7 drivers in the future.
The leak, which was shared on Twitter by leaker @g01d3nm4ng0, suggests Microsoft hasn’t certified a Wi-Fi 7 driver for Windows 10, thus locking those on the older operating system out of taking advantage of the upgraded speed and reliability it is supposed to offer.
But why exactly should you care about Wi-Fi 7? If you’re just a casual user, it probably won’t make much of a difference. However, people who rely on their internet to download and upload large files for work will find that Wi-Fi 7 offers several key benefits, including faster handling speeds.
In fact, the current iteration of Wi-Fi, Wi-Fi 6 and Wi-Fi 6e, is only set to support up to 9.6Gbps of speed. However, MediaTek says that Wi-Fi 7 will support up to 36Gbps speeds, making it substantially faster than current Wi-Fi options. That means Wi-Fi will come one step closer to being as efficient and fast as wired connections, a huge boon for a world that continues to be constantly connected.
Of course, seeing support for Wi-Fi 7 ripped away from Windows 10 users isn’t that surprising. We’ve known that Microsoft planned to end support for Windows 10 since 2021 when it announced the sunsetting of Windows 10 in October of 2025. As such, it isn’t surprising that Microsoft hasn’t certified a Windows 10 driver for Wi-Fi 7 and instead is pushing it to Windows 11, which it has been pushing on users for the past couple of years.
There’s no release date for Wi-Fi 7 yet, but if you want to take advantage of its increased speed and features, you may want to consider upgrading to Windows 11.