Apple’s iPhone 17 lineup is getting plenty of attention for the usual stuff—large camera deco, unibody design, another chipset bump, and some issues with the anodized aluminum—but one of the more interesting changes is the one most people won’t even see. The phone is running on Apple’s new N1 networking chip, the first time the company has replaced the Broadcom parts it used for years. And based on fresh numbers from Ookla’s Speedtest data, that change is already showing up in real-world results.
Ookla pulled together crowdsourced Wi-Fi 7 performance from a wide mix of devices: the Pixel 10 series, Samsung’s Galaxy S25 lineup, and a handful of Snapdragon- and Dimensity-based phones including the vivo X200 Pro, Oppo Find X8 Pro, and the Huawei Pura 80 family. What surprised a lot of people is how well the iPhone 17 is hanging with (and sometimes beating) these Android flagships, even though this is Apple’s first attempt at building its own networking silicon.
Compared to the iPhone 16, the jump is clear—roughly a 40% boost in overall network performance. Globally, Google’s Pixel 10 still squeaks ahead with a slightly higher median download speed, but the gap is tiny. And when you look at the slower end of results—the speeds people hit in crowded apartments, cafés, airports—the iPhone 17 actually comes out looking stronger. It manages to hold onto more bandwidth when things get messy.
North America is where the difference shows the most. It has the highest Wi-Fi 7 adoption right now, and in that sample, the iPhone 17 posts peak speeds around 416 Mbps. That’s a hair above the Pixel 10 Pro (411.21 Mbps) and well ahead of Samsung’s S25 (323.69 Mbps). The high-end numbers tell a similar story: Apple is almost brushing 1 Gbps at the 90th percentile, which is impressive for a first-gen custom chip.
One weird wrinkle: the N1 still tops out at 160 MHz channel width, even though Wi-Fi 7 goes up to 320 MHz. On paper, that should hold Apple back. But Ookla’s data suggests that whatever Apple is doing under the hood is making up for the narrower channels, at least for now.
Wi-Fi 7 is still new in most of the world—only a small percentage of users in Europe and Asia are actually running it—but Apple clearly sees this as a long-term play.
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