Part of the development for "Proof of Stake" Ethereum includes scaling the number of transactions via sharding. Each shard will be able to handle 2,400 tps. As more shards are deployed up to 64, Ethereum will reach 160,000 tps. Please note, the upcoming improvement to Proof of Stake Ethereum does not yet use sharding, but it is under development.
As comparison 1,700 tps for the Visa network is a good benchmark. I recall Visa's technical capability is 10x or 100x that number though. This comparison isn't intended to claim "ETH beats Visa for currency stuff", but simply to give a sense of the potential impact of Ethereum as it improves. Thousands of transactions per second implies a powerful network, whatever it's used for.