For the discerning and high-end traveller out there, portable hotspots mean something quite different from what regular joes might think. Rather than heading to a new country on a business or personal trip and trying to get by with a roaming charge and your phone's hotspot capabilities, there's a better, more expensive way.
Netgear has been one of the big names in the best mobile hotspot running for years now, but it's fair to say that its devices don't come cheap, for the most part. Nighthawk is one of its most premium sub-brands, and the M7 Pro has been one of the best devices out there in recent years, with a stonking £900 price tag to boot.
Now, though, Netgear has a new Nighthawk portable router coming out, and it's much less crazily priced (albeit it's still really expensive). The Nighthawk 5G M7 drops the "Pro" from its name and upsizes a bit in terms of how bulky it is, but crucially brings the price right down to £529.99 RRP.
It'll launch in January next year, and while it doesn't have quite the same specs as the M7 Pro, it's still an ultra-capable little router, and probably makes a lot more sense for most people.
For one thing, it has a built-in battery life of around 10 hours on a charge, which means you can use it all day without any trouble, but its USB-C charging port also lets it double as a (low-capacity) power bank in a pinch to rescue your phone. In terms of actual connectivity, though, it's a bit of a beast.
You can rely on WiFi 7 speeds of up to 3.6 Gbps through its SIM or eSIM connection, to up to 32 connected devices at once. So, even if you've got a big family or a department to connect, you should be fine.
The other big new change for Netgear is that this is its first router to use a new version of the Netgear app. Crucially, this will introduce the ability to buy eSIM packages in-app, without any external searching or comparisons needed – meaning you can load up a data plan super quickly.
You'll still be able to load your own eSIMs in, through that same app, so you're not locked into using Netgear's storefront, and a physical SIM slot rounds out the options, but it's a big change for Netgear's way of organising things. I was told by Netgear that the M7 Pro would also move over to the new app in due course, although probably at least a few weeks after the M7 comes out.
