A lot of things affect your internet speed, and often, most of them don’t have much to do with your ISP. For instance, your router’s location matters more than your internet speed. Additionally, you could prioritize the bandwidth for specific devices, so that your main device never feels slow again.
However, despite fixing these home network mistakes, there’s still one setting that comes disabled by default and could be the reason why everything on your network feels slow, even when you have a superfast gigabit connection and a top-of-the-line Wi-Fi 6 router. That setting is a 160MHz channel width, and turning it on could nearly double your wireless speeds overnight.
What is a 160MHz channel width, and why is it disabled?
Wider channels mean faster data transfer
Your Wi-Fi router communicates with your devices using radio frequencies, and those frequencies are divided into channel and wider channel lets more traffic through at once. By default, most Wi-Fi 6 routers operate at 80MHz channel width on the 5GHz band. That’s plenty fast for most people, but it’s only using half the bandwidth your router is actually capable of.
When you switch to 160MHz, you’re essentially doubling the width of that lane. Your router can now push significantly more data to compatible devices in the same amount of time. This is especially useful for things like transferring large files to a NAS, streaming 4K content across your home, or any situation where local network speed matters more than your internet plan.
Wi-Fi 6 introduced 160MHz support as a key feature alongside improvements like MU-OFDMA and better handling of multiple connected devices. And while we have Wi-Fi 7 routers with even wider 320MHz channels, the vast majority of people are still on Wi-Fi 6 or 6E hardware where 160MHz remains the practical ceiling.
So why do router manufacturers ship it turned off? Three reasons:
- 160MHz on the 5GHz band requires using DFS (Dynamic Frequency Selection) channels, which are shared with weather radar. When the router detects radar signals, it has to temporarily vacate those channels, causing brief disconnections or a fallback to 80MHz.
- Not all devices support 160MHz. Many phones, including older iPhones, are capped at 80MHz, and some budget devices with older chipsets don’t handle the wider channel gracefully.
- In dense neighborhoods with dozens of overlapping networks, grabbing a clean 160MHz block of spectrum is often impossible, and forcing it can actually make things worse.
For these reasons, manufacturers play it safe and default to 80MHz, which works reliably for the widest range of devices and environments.
How much speed are you actually losing?
The difference is bigger than you’d expect
On paper, doubling the channel width from 80MHz to 160MHz roughly doubles your theoretical throughput. A typical Wi-Fi 6 connection with a 2×2 antenna setup goes from a 1,201Mbps link rate at 80MHz to 2,401Mbps at 160MHz.
In practice, the gains hold up. In same-room testing with a clean signal and minimal interference, 80MHz typically tops out around 100–120 MB/s of actual file transfer speed. With 160MHz enabled under the same conditions, that number jumps to roughly 190–220 MB/s, making it a 2x improvement.
That said, the gains shrink fast with distance, walls, and interference. If your router is two rooms away or your neighborhood is packed with competing networks, 160MHz might not outperform 80MHz at all and could even be worse. The real-world benefit depends entirely on your environment, which is why testing after enabling it matters more than assuming you’ll get faster speeds.
How to enable 160MHz (and when to leave it off)
The steps depend on your router brand
The exact steps vary by manufacturer, but the general idea should apply irrespective of your router manufacturer. Log into your router’s admin page, find the wireless settings for the 5GHz band, and change the channel width from 80MHz (or Auto) to 160MHz.
On a TP-Link router like the AX5400, open a browser and go to your router’s admin page (usually http://tplinkwifi.net or the IP address on your router’s label). Log in, then navigate to Advanced > Wireless > Wireless Settings. Select the 5GHz band tab, find the Channel Width dropdown, and change it to 160MHz. Click Save and give the router a moment to apply the change.
For other brands, the path is similar: ASUS puts it under Advanced Settings > Wireless > Channel Bandwidth, while Netgear buries it under BASIC > Wireless with the width option tied to the Mode setting.
After enabling it, run a speed test, both for internet speed and local file transfers if you have a NAS. If your speeds improve and everything stays connected, you’re good. If devices start dropping off or you notice intermittent disconnections, your environment likely can’t support a clean 160MHz channel.
This brings up the important caveat: If you live in an apartment building or dense neighborhood with many overlapping Wi-Fi networks, you probably won’t find a clean enough 160MHz block to make it worthwhile. The same goes if you’re near an airport or weather radar station, since DFS events will force your router to keep switching channels. And if most of your devices are phones or older gadgets that only support 80MHz, there’s no benefit to enabling it since those devices will negotiate down to 80MHz regardless. In these cases, you’re better off sticking with the default.
Small tweak, but not a universal fix
Enabling 160MHz is one of the easiest changes you can make to squeeze more speed out of your existing router, and it’s worth trying if you have a Wi-Fi 6 or newer router and compatible devices. But it’s not a magic fix. Your environment, your devices, and even your DNS settings all play a role in how fast your network actually feels.
If you try it and things get worse, switch it back to 80MHz. But if your setup is right for it, you might wonder why you didn’t turn it on sooner.
