I mean, if speed is the only reason to upgrade what would be the point? A phone can never make use of 6E speeds it's entirely pointless to have even faster.

Are there some other benefits it's missing out on?

Honestly though by the time wifi 7 is out in the world enough to be utilised the majority of Pixel 8 phones will be on the scrapheap.

I'm just going to put this information here: the use case for 46Gb WiFi is going to be extremely niche. There is nearly no legitimate use case where you can achieve that speed on your phone.

The problem here is that:

1. The majority of internet traffic is TCP
2. TCP protocol processing is atomic (i.e. your speed is bottlenecked by a single CPU)
3. The bottleneck is the receiver (i.e. downloader)
4. TCP is too complex for efficient receiver-side hardware offloads (i.e. can't workaround this issue by adding more special hardware)

What does this mean?

Your connection speed on a wifi 7 device WILL be bottlenecked by your single-core CPU speed, even if you are doing absolutely nothing except transmitting data. This assumes you are only using a TCP single connection (e.g. downloading a file from a website). But that's the majority of use cases unless you are running a server (in this case on your phone).

I haven't checked what CPU the Pixel 8 uses. But my Pixel 7 has a Cortex A-78. I also don't have the raw data handy for the 3Ghz A-78, but I do have data from the 2Ghz A-53 connected to a 100Gbps Ethernet NIC which is around 8-9Gbps. The A78 generally outperforms the A53 by 1.5x (At least that's the characteristics on the Nvidia Bluefield DPUs). So we can assume 12-14Gbps max for a single connection with Wifi 7 running on a state-of-the-art ARM CPU.

That is still nowhere near 46Gbps. It's like mounting a Vulcan Minigun on a bicycle.

To use the full wifi bandwidth, you would need to have multiple connections running on different cores. That's also not including the switches/servers connected to the wifi AP. Unless you are running a Redis server on your phone, I see no reason why Wifi 7 would be needed unless the remaining hardware is upgraded significantly.

My home internet tops out well below 9.6 Gb/s. I'm Canadian, so it's unlikely my ISP will provide that at a reasonable price. Hence, this is unlikely to affect my buying decision.

If it's a flagship phone and the other flagships are shipping with the chipset that is wifi 7 then it's a bad mark against Google.

However in real terms it's unlikely to impact the majority of users. Considering there's no routers with wifi 7 in existence and no Internet companies are capable of 46gbs.

Google should be future proofing devices. If they reduce price for an older modem then that would be beneficial. They won't but it would be nice.

My home internet is 25/5. I just upgraded the home network to Wi-Fi 6E, after years of Wi-Fi 4. While 7 would be nice to have for future consideration, it's still too expensive for me to adopt it.

Meh