Speedtest.net’s owner Ookla has published a new report detailing Wi-Fi performance of iPhone 17 users in the wild. The data shows that the new iPhones gets significantly faster WiFi speeds compared to iPhone 16, showing the benefits of the new Apple-designed N1 chip.
The new N1 chip can be found in iPhone 17, iPhone 17 Pro and iPhone Air. The new iPhone lineup achieves faster download and upload speeds in every region that Ookla tracks.
Overall, average download and upload speeds on iPhones with the N1 chip were about 40% higher than the year-ago iPhone 16 models. For instance, in North America, Ookla records iPhone 16 as averaging 323 Mbps download speeds. iPhone 17 Wi-Fi scores are much higher, achieving 416 Mbps average download.
Although the size of the gains varied across regions, the iPhone 17 was consistently faster. The improvements also seem disproportionally greater in areas with weak signal. That means the new iPhones with the N1 chip fare better in the worst conditions, than how the older iPhones with Qualcomm modems handled these environments.
While the Apple N1 chip supports the latest Wi-Fi 7 standard, some complained that the iPhone 17 only supports the theoretically-slower 160 MHz frequency and not the wider 320 MHz band. However, Ookla says in practice, this does not make much difference in achievable real-world speeds.
Some other manufacturers claim they support 320MHz connections. Nevertheless, the iPhone 17 family topped the charts of Wi-Fi performance for high-end smartphones in North America. The simple fact is that there aren’t many Wi-Fi 7 320MHz-capable routers in use in the wild yet, and the advantages of the wider spectrum fall off quickly the further away from the access point the phone gets.
The takeaway from the survey data is that Apple’s N1 chip represents a marked improvement in Wi-Fi performance on iPhone. For a first-generation in-house chip, that is a big achievement, and another example of Apple’s silicon teams firing on all cylinders.
Apple claims the N1 chip attains this performance level with maximal efficiency, including special low-power modes for background tasks like location tracking. As well as Wi-Fi, the N1 chip is also responsible for handling the integrated Bluetooth and Thread radios.