By Gareth Butterfield

Copyright scotsman

It can’t be easy, making wireless mobile routers. The technology behind bringing the internet to our gadgets is moving so fast, and tech brands are having to adapt at a frenetic pace.

To illustrate this point, during the summer, I tested Netgear’s Nighthawk M6 Pro wireless mobile router. It superseded the trusty Nighthawk M5 I’d been using for a few years, and the stats were eye-opening.

WiFi 6E, 5G speeds of up to 2.5 Gbps, and WiFi speeds up to 3.6 Gbps. It felt like it was the absolute pinnacle of mobile hotspot tech.

And then, a month later, Netgear launched the Nighthawk M7 Pro. And all of a sudden the M6 Pro felt a bit obsolete.

This newcomer not only upped the speed significantly, with 5G speeds up to 6 Gbps, and WiFi speeds up to 5.8 Gbps, but it also added WiFi 7. I’ve got to be brutally honest, I didn’t even know WiFi 7 was a thing yet, but here it is, literally in the palm of my hand.

I’ve been living with the Nighthawk M7 Pro for a few weeks now, and it’s an astonishing bit of kit.

My use case for these hotspot devices is perhaps rather unusual. I have a motorhome and a boat, and my wife and I love to explore rural England in them.

Rural England isn’t a great pasture for testing ridiculously quick hotspot speeds, but we are finding 5G in far more places than we used to and, more importantly, we’re usually doing everything we can to cling onto and wring out a weak data signal.

The other issue we have is that my wife is also a gadget freak. We both like to take our tech with us, and it can include everything from a WiFi-controlled portable dishwasher to VR headsets and wireless cameras to monitor the dogs with.

So we place some pretty significant demands on our mobile routers, and Netgear’s Nighthawk series has always stood up to the job.

It didn’t take long, during our last trip to the pretty parts of Suffolk, to realise that the improvements made to the Nighthawk M7 Pro mean so much more than just a leap up in speed.

Firstly, it’s a little lighter. It’s still a surprisingly unassuming little square of plastic, but there’s a bigger, more responsive touchscreen and it’s easier to navigate the menus.

It also has significantly better battery life, and a Qualcomm Snapdragon modem, giving even more powerful signal capture.

In short, the Nighthawk M7 never missed a beat during our week-long holiday. Even in deepest-darkest parts of the East Anglian countryside, we had a reliable data signal and, at one campsite, we enjoyed speeds five times faster than the on-site WiFi we’d have had to pay for.

And then, when we got home, I put the M7 Pro through some proper torture. I switched off our BT router and relied solely on our local 5G signal, providing every connected gadget in my house (there are 52 in all) with WiFi from the Nighthawk.

Again, it didn’t suffer a single cough or splutter. The M7 Pro can cope with up to 64 devices at a time, and even though my wife and I were in and out of video calls, and she spent her lunch hour streaming some content on a TV, we didn’t have a single drop-out.

To say I’m impressed with the M7 Pro would be an understatement. It is quite possibly one of the best gadgets I’ve tested this year.

In truth, there was nothing wrong with the M6 Pro, and I’m not sure the speeds were all that different in the real world, away from urban super-speeds, but it’s fair to say the M7 was more reliable, obviously more powerful, and the fact it’s easier to use and has a better battery is the icing on the cake.

There is, however, an issue. It costs a lot of money. There’s currently a £50 discount on Amazon at the moment, which is worth catching, but it’s still an eye-watering £849.99. My entire holiday cost less than that.

Unsurprisingly, the M6 Pro is now a little cheaper at £699, but it’s still quite the investment. The competent base model, the M3 has dropped in price too, to £449.

But these are the ultimate in 5G mobile routers. You just wouldn’t believe how well they work and how effective they are.