[mrb]

While I generally agree that in the real world you never get close to the theoretical max bandwidth, it is worth pointing out that 7 is significantly faster than 6E, so in laboratory condition you will definitely be limited by the 2.5 GbE bottleneck. With a single MIMO stream WiFi 7 provides 2882 Mbit/s (320 MHz or 160+160 MHz channel, 4096-QAM, 5/6 coding) vs WiFi 6 which provides only 1201 Mbit/s (160 MHz channel, 1024-QAM, 5/6 coding). So a single MIMO stream can exceed the 2.5 GbE capacity, and multiple MIMO streams would exceed even further.

[ksec]

Exactly. Really wish the world pushes towards 5Gbps Ethernet instead.

[BizarroLand]

I run a home lab and I rarely see any advantage between 2.5 and 10g. Not to say that there is none, seeing a large file transfer at 1gbps or more is fun, but the time savings vs the cost just isn't quite there for me yet.

My entire file library is only about 10 TB, and most of that is from ripped DVDs & blurays. My opportunities to transmit or receive more than a gig of data in a single transfer is extremely rare, so it makes little difference to me (and my assumption is by proxy, most users) that it could go ~4 times faster.

For actual business work, though, any lab I set up from the future on will be min-spec to 2.5gig and expected to run 10gig on at least any IT machine/vlan/subnet, whatever.

But for the home consumer, 2.5 is probably 10-50x their home internet connection and more than sufficient for normal daily use.