Apple has done a excellent job at seamlessly migrating iPhones 17 from Broadcom to its own N1 wireless networking chip. It packs 2×2 Wi‑Fi 7 (based on 802.11be standard), Bluetooth 6 and Thread. Most users have probably not even noticed, have you?
Executing such a significant change takes some serious efforts, so I asked myself:
- What has changed? Do iPhones with N1 chip behave differently from iPhones using Broadcom?
- Are all the enterprise features supported?
- Do Wi-Fi capabilities of standard iPhone 17 model differ from iPhone 17 Pro Max or iPhone Air?
- From over-the-air captures, can I tell if an iPhone uses Broadcom or N1 Wi-Fi chip?
- Does power saving work the same way?
Let’s see how many of these questions we can answer.
Consistent Wi-Fi capabilities across all iPhone 17 models
All iPhone 17 models use the same Apple N1 chip. Their Wi-Fi capabilities are fully consistent between iPhone 17, iPhone Air, iPhone 17 Pro, and iPhone 17 Pro Max. But how can I be so sure?
I “profiled” all 4 of the new iPhones on each of the 3 Wi-Fi bands.
WLAN Pi Profiler
Profiler is a Python app that runs on WLAN Pi and its Linux-based operating system. It uses a standard client Wi-Fi adapter, simulates an access point, and it broadcast beacon frames. Profiler pretends to be “the most capable access point” supporting all features and amendments.
As soon as a Wi-Fi client (think iPhone) attempts to join the Profiler SSID, Profiler captures all client’s Wi-Fi capabilities.
Finally, Profiler generates a client capability report – coming up in the next section. Beyond that, it also saves packet capture of the Association Request sent by the client device for future analysis.
Josh is the engineer, developer, and bright mind behind Profiler. Send him some kudos if you want the tool useful.
The 2.4 GHz band
With Profiler running on WLAN Pi on channel 11, I captured these Apple N1 capabilities. To remind us, all the iPhone 17 generation phones use the same N1 chip, and report the same Wi-Fi capabilities.
No surprises there, which is great! The usual amendments like 802.11k neighbour report, 802.11r Fast Transition, 802.11v, or 802.11w Protected Management Frames are supported.
The adapter runs in 2×2 MIMO mode, and reports maximum transmit power up to 25 dBm. Note that it indicates support for 6 GHz.
To put what we have captured for N1 into perspective, iPhone 15 Pro supports up to 21 dBm (not that you want it to run at maximum power).
The 5 GHz band
Before we dive into 5 GHz and 6 GHz, I should say that I am in the UK, my Profiler uses GB country code, and the iPhone is aware of its location too. Supported channels and transmit power levels will vary depending on which part of the world you are in.
This time we start Profiler on channel 36 and attempt to connect the iPhone to the Profiler SSID. Few seconds later we get a 5 GHz band report.
Here is a quick comparison to iPhone 15 Pro using the same channel. How many differences have you noticed?
The 6 GHz band
Since Profiler doesn’t support 6 GHz AP mode, for this test I brought my own battery-powered Wi-Fi 7 access point.
I used Profiler to capture iPhone’s association request to this AP using this command sudo profiler –noAP -f 5975. What 6 GHz channel is that? Can you tell by the centre frequency? I wrote a little tool called wifichannel for conversion between frequency and channel number.
N1 supports 6 GHz channel width up to 160 MHz (not that you want to use 160 MHz and let alone 320 MHz in enterprise).
Let’s compare N1 profile to iPhone 15 Pro and its Wi-Fi 6E Broadcom silicon.
Now, why does N1 show 802.11r as “Not reported”? That’s a Layer 8 problem. I didn’t have Fast Transition enabled on my AP, and when I noticed it was too late 😊 You can spot “802.11r Off” in the screenshot below and the 160 MHz max channel width captured by the AP.
PCAP or it didn’t happen!
As we mentioned, Profiler also saves Association Requests coming sent by the client devices. Here are PCAPs of iPhone 17 Pro Max associating to Profiler SSID in 2.4 GHz, 5 GHz, and 6 GHz bands.
How to tell from a packet capture what Wi-Fi silicon does an iPhone use?
iPhones 15 Pro and 16 include Broadcom vendor tag in their Association Request frames. iPhones 17 do not.
2 Spatial Streams in Low Power mode?
I switched iPhone 17 Pro to Low Power mode, and I was curious if it behaves the same way as previous generations. It doesn’t as far as I can tell as of iOS 26.0 release.
Unlike previous generations of iPhones which downshift from 2 Spatial Streams (SS) to 1 SS, iPhone 17 Pro keeps using 2 streams even in Low Power mode. This might be a new behaviour, unless it changes in a future release. Let me know if you have tested it too.