> And yeah, you pretty much already have to have a visible line of sight to get anything even close to 1 Gbps

If one considers that the higher speeds in 802.11ac and 802.11be require 256QAM modulation or better, this is completely expected (assuming 5 GHz band of course, which doesn't go through material very well at all). If you've sen a live eyeball chart of a 256QAM or 1024QAM constellation on test equipment for clear-air microwave link purposes, and seen how quickly it can degrade or get fuzzy if there's anything in the way of the link, it becomes more readily apparent. MCS levels 8 and onwards here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wi-Fi_7

"Clean" eyeball example of 256QAM: https://www.everythingrf.com/community/what-is-256-qam-modul...

examples of "fuzzy qam" in 16QAM, same principle applies to denser QAM

https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Typical-eye-diagram-Symb...

Yeah, used to run a wifi bridge by necessity for years (yay rental). I could get stable 1gig over wifi6 which is why I'm a little puzzled that 7 isn't much better

Have you thought about using powerline devices? I’ve successfully used them in place where running my own cable wasn’t a possibility, and WiFi wasn’t cutting it.

https://www.hp.com/us-en/shop/tech-takes/what-is-a-powerline...