From 300 to 1300 Mbit/s over Wi-Fi: MLO on a Mercusys MR27BE with Netnørden 2500/2500

The setup#

I'm on a 2500/2500 Mbit/s fibre line from Netnørden, and the line itself is not the problem. Plugged in with a cable, I get a genuine 2500/2500, every time.

This post is purely about Wi-Fi. On the exact same line and the exact same router, Wi-Fi didn't even come close: I was getting around 300 Mbit/s.

That's roughly an eighth of what the wired connection does. Not "Wi-Fi is always a bit slower". An eighth.

The router is a Mercusys MR27BE, a BE3600 dual-band Wi-Fi 7 router. It's firmly in the budget end of the market, and that matters for the rest of this post, because the fix wasn't buying something more expensive.

The device I tested with is my iPhone Air (the thin one from the iPhone 17 lineup). It has Apple's N1 wireless chip, which means Wi-Fi 7, which means it can actually use the feature this whole post is about.

What was actually wrong#

Nothing was broken. The ISP was delivering, and the router's wired side was keeping up. The wireless side was just running with the settings it shipped with, and two of those settings were holding it back:

MLO was off, so my Wi-Fi 7 client was connecting like any old Wi-Fi 6 device on a single band.
AI QoS was on, quietly sitting in the middle of every packet.

Two toggles. That was it.

What MLO is, without the marketing#

MLO (Multi-Link Operation) is the headline feature of Wi-Fi 7. Normally a device connects on one band at a time: 2.4 GHz or 5 GHz. With MLO, a Wi-Fi 7 device can hold links on more than one band at once and use them together, or jump between them without dropping the connection.

On a dual-band router like the MR27BE, that means 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz working as one connection instead of your device picking one and hoping for the best.

The catch: both ends need to support it. MLO does nothing for a Wi-Fi 6 laptop. You need a Wi-Fi 7 client, and MLO needs to be switched on in the router.

The iPhone Air ticks that box. Its N1 chip does Wi-Fi 7 with MLO, and it tops out at 160 MHz channels, not the full 320 MHz Wi-Fi 7 allows. That sounds like a downside, but the MR27BE is a 160 MHz router anyway, so the phone and the router are a perfect match. Nothing is left on the table.

Why I turned off AI QoS#

QoS (quality of service) is meant to prioritise traffic: games and calls first, downloads later. The "AI" version tries to guess what your traffic is and shape it for you.

On consumer routers, inspecting and sorting every packet costs CPU, and on cheaper hardware it can get in the way of the fast, hardware-accelerated path. On a 100 Mbit/s line you'd never notice. On a multi-gig line, it's one more thing standing between you and your speed.

And with a symmetric 2.5 Gbit line there's nothing to ration anyway. Prioritising traffic solves a problem I don't have. So it went off.

To be fair: I flipped both settings in the same go, so I can't say exactly how much each one contributed. My money is on MLO doing most of the work, with QoS off making sure nothing else was holding the Wi-Fi back.

The result#

After enabling MLO and disabling AI QoS, the same iPhone in the same spot went from about 300 Mbit/s to around 1300 Mbit/s over Wi-Fi.

That's more than four times faster. For free, in about two minutes.

Why not the full 2500?#

Because it's Wi-Fi, and physics still applies.

The MR27BE's 5 GHz radio is rated at 2882 Mbit/s (2×2 streams, 160 MHz channels), and that's a link rate, not real throughput. Real-world Wi-Fi usually lands at roughly half of the link rate once you account for overhead, walls and everything else in the air. 1300 Mbit/s is right about where a 2×2 Wi-Fi 7 setup should end up.

If you want the full 2500, plug in a cable. That's exactly what I get wired: the router has a 2.5 Gbit WAN port and a 2.5 Gbit LAN port, so the wired path carries the whole line, no tuning needed.

Is the MR27BE any good?#

For the price, it's ridiculous. It's genuinely the best bang for the buck I've seen in a Wi-Fi 7 router.

2.5 Gbit WAN and LAN, so it doesn't bottleneck a multi-gig fibre line like a lot of cheap routers do.
Wi-Fi 7 with MLO and 160 MHz, which is what got me from 300 to 1300.
A price that's a fraction of what "gaming" routers ask.

It has limits, and it's fair to be clear about them:

Dual band only. There's no 6 GHz radio, so you're not getting the absolute top Wi-Fi 7 speeds.
Range is range. In a big house you'll still want a second unit or a mesh (it supports EasyMesh).
The Wi-Fi defaults aren't tuned for fast lines. Wired was flawless from day one, but out of the box Wi-Fi was stuck at 300. You have to go into the settings.

The takeaway#

If your cable gets the full multi-gig speed but your Wi-Fi feels like the old 300 Mbit/s plan, the line isn't the problem, and you probably don't need a new router either. Check two things first:

Is MLO on, and is your device Wi-Fi 7? (The iPhone 17, 17 Pro and Air all are.)
Is some "smart" QoS feature sitting in the middle of your traffic on a line that doesn't need it?

For me that was the difference between 300 and 1300 Mbit/s, on a router from the budget shelf.