Netgear Nighthawk M5 Unboxing - Check out the speed at the end!

well hello everybody and welcome to another unboxing video i'm toby travener that's the guy that's been around telco for a couple of decades getting on three now and netgear have kindly asked me to um to have a look at their new nighthawk m5 now this is a cellular 5g connected device that acts as a a wi-fi hotspot as well but what i thought we might do today is something a little bit different and go through the history of the nighthawks i've got with me today a nighthawk m1 and a nighthawk m2 as well we might actually just have a quick look at those right here is a nighthawk n1 and that's that happens to be the one that's connected at the moment we're going to do a speed test on that in a second this is a nighthawk m2 you can see that they've been beaten around quite heavily they've had a lot of use over the years and i thought when when we get a chance then to unbox the uh nighthawk m5 the new 5g version will have had a chance to actually see what the difference is now i happen to be in a pretty good 4g zone i know that i haven't tested the 5g because i don't have a 5g device until now so this is going to be very interesting why don't we first have a look at running a few speed tests on the older devices before we unbox the other one why don't we um start with the oldest device still one of my favorite because it had the kind of cool little you know this thing here the cool little circular screen as you can see yeah it's there it is fully charged up says a few error messages probably i've used up all my data but it's one of those things because i'm on a shared plan um we'll do a speed test and we'll cut to the um the computer now and see what see what we end up getting all right so we've started this one as you can see um i've got this hard wired via a little switch so that we're not um having to include anything to do with the wi-fi connection as well we're just doing the cellular connection at the moment and goodness me that's pretty good right that's not bad at all and to be robust we should probably run this test um maybe three times and take an average but that's pretty good first of these is 218 down and 52 up let's do another one now and i'll speed up the process as you can imagine uh in editing just so that we don't have to sit here and watch it all going on and as you can see there's test number two a little bit faster by the looks of things and we'll do test number three well i thought it did pretty well to be honest with you that was averaging around and we'll do the calculations at the end of this video but we're getting about 250 megabits per second down around the 50 megabits per second up mark so you know what for an older device with an older category chipset that's pretty good why don't we now have a look at what's happening with the m2 before we get into the exciting bit which of course is the nighthawk m5 so the first thing i'm going to do here is to unplug the cat 5 or cat 6 cable probably a cat 5 e cable actually and make sure that we've got the nighthawk there we go nighthawk m2 fired up so i'll just make sure i've got a connection here and uh looks like we have and let's have a look at the speed test of the nighthawk m2 and so let's hit go yeah quite a bit faster because the m2 has got a different chipset different category of chipsets but a considerable difference in speed this first time around of pushing close to 400 megabits per second on the way down and over a hundred megabits per second on the way up uh i think we should do a couple of these tests just for robustness sake and of course by the magic of video we'll probably speed these up so that they're nice and quick not the total result that is just the active testing all right so as you can see what we're seeing here is around 400 a little under on a couple of occasions little over on a couple of occasions 400 megabits per second down and about 100 megabits per second up so i'm now looking forward to seeing what the new nighthawk m5 looks like so why don't we clear the decks and open up the box and get it up and running okay well here is the box awesome you know we love boxes but a couple of things to point out and this is i have not opened this as yet i literally only just cut the tabs off it a second ago late well it does say latest wi-fi technology which would be interesting because um although the speed of the cellular connection is important we also know that the speed and how it actually works in uh in a wi-fi environment it's going to be important as well now it does say that it is a fixed wireless modem router what that's intending to do is describing the fact that it is being um used as a device it's likely not to move around but quite frankly there have been many occasions where this has been in my briefcase and i've been using my laptop connected to a device similar to this one so why don't we open it up and see what's in there okay here we go there's the box and there is the design very nice okay looks um well it does look like an evolution of the the other two which is which is pretty good all right in the box as you can see we've got the device itself nice and as we look at the back very very similar there is a slot uh for the sim card and obviously a large battery uh compartment as well within the box also we have a brand spanking new battery to go along with it a little different from the last one in that the um the adapters uh the connectors i should say are on an extended uh little block there uh and i might just bring up one of the older ones just so you can see that see the difference um the other this is an older one the older one was flush now that seems to me for me as an indication to say okay they're trying to crank out as uh every last bit of battery that they possibly can either that or they just want to you know extend the the connectors deep inside the unit all right inside here i'm sure will be the how do i use this yep there is the standard manual that's very nice and lo and behold the back which is good and uh it's nice to see a device manufacturer providing a power adapter that might be topical at the moment there's the power adapter and as you can see uh usb 3 to usbc connection why don't we put the device together and see how it goes all right well um let's get the sim card in and put it all together hopefully it's got a bit of charge but we can always charge it up pretty quickly now by the looks of things as you can see here that it's not a micro sim anymore it's a nano sim slot a bit different from the old ones so let's get rid of the frame for that pop in the sims as so the battery goes in pretty easily there you go and uh why don't we stick the cover on and it looks like it's just a snap together yeah it is turn it over and power up now interesting this time that the older unit the m2 had a button that was kind of had no tactical feel to it it was just a button and now this one actually does you can you might be able to hear it it does have the ability to to push it in now it's got no power so let's uh let's plug it in and fire up okay while it is powering up a little bit there one of the things that i can see down the bottom if i can uh pull it off and let's still allow you to see it there are some slots there for external antenna as you can see all right all of the units have had that one and this one is no exception all right now it's part pairing up and you can see it says 5g let's see how long it takes to to turn on nice little animation 5g animation taking place all right now it's going through conv congratulations on purchasing your nighthawk mobile router all right i think you can see that to use your mobile router we will first set up the wi-fi name and password and then secure uh your settings with an admin password all right let's go that's fairly easy to do now of course i'm doing this upside down which is a lot of fun uh customize your wi-fi we do recommend that you change the default credentials to your own custom credentials right now i'm not going to do that i'm just going to keep it going as is and it now says right here create the admin password for your hotspot it says skip and use the default admin password create admin password now of course when i do this again after this video i will set all this up but for now for speed let's just do skip and then it says battery power save feature that's pretty good to preserve the battery the wi-fi will automatically turn off after five minutes if no devices are connected okay tapping the power off button power button will also wake up wi-fi from standby so i again i'm not going to customize for now all right but there it is we've got a wi-fi name a wi-fi password of course the admin name is admin admin password as password for now let's go to dashboard this is and there we go and now you can see you can tell already for the people who are very clever this is a very old sim card because you can see i've got like 100 meg on it being that i'm on a a very much a shared plan with within with my carrier right now you can tell that uh at the moment although that hundred meg's gonna disappear pretty quickly um with about you know 700 gig in total um i'm going to probably smash this pretty well so um let's have a look and see if we can get it to fire up all right i'm going to bypass the wi-fi of this as we've done already and i'm going to plug it in and see what we get so let's um let's plug in the the cat6 cable cat5e could be any of those into the rj45 port and then fire up the laptop and see how we go and this is the exciting bit really i'm really keen to to see how we go now i did check beforehand to ensure that i had a 5g coverage and it does seem that i'm right in one of the 5g areas so let's um let's see what the test brings up so here's the thing i'm all excited about testing the nighthawk m5 and i'm getting signal that's the same speed as 4g and then i went well hang on a sec that's the speed why don't i have a look at the device and i looked at the device and i only had 4g on it not 5g so first thing comes into my mind is i better check the coverage and i checked it again and i thought well maybe we're right on the edge i'll um i'll hop in the car and take the device into an area where i know is 5g and sure enough it's 4g only after a lot of playing around with settings racking my brain i finally tweaked that the sim card is a data only card that's not on the right plan with my carrier it's not on a large or an extra large plan it's just an extra data card so of course 5g is not enabled on that sim so if you haven't worked out that my beard is slightly now shorter and my hair's changed a little bit a few days have passed and i've managed to put in a 5g enabled sim so let's test it now and see what we get all right so of course in post-production we're going to speed the tests themselves up but not the results and this is better this is much better okay so we've hit 700 megabits per second but it's doing very very well this first one has come through at there you go 758 on the download and let's see if it gets similar speeds to 4g and yes there it is all right let's have a look at the second test for robustness we'll do it again um we're so close to hitting the 800 mark on the download and we've come in at 778 and again around the 88 mark on the way up let's try again let's see if we can get the elusive 800 megabits per second oh it's close it's close there it is and that's pretty good at 816 megabits per second on the way down and what looks like a similar speed 86.9 megabits per second on the way up now that's pretty good all right with speeds like that with results like that it's very clear that this new nighthawk m5 is going to be my device of choice now let's face it in real world conditions what i mean by real world conditions when you're just using it normally we're not necessarily going to have speeds that fast i'm using speed test which is clearly designed to get the best out of the device i'm using a server on speed test which seems to be one of the fastest ones and i don't know if i'm being affected by too many other people on this particular cell tower i'm close to the cell tower and um i don't seem to have very much interference from anything else the the signal coverage is fantastic so real life speeds can vary but you'll find that the speeds are going to be pretty good so remember distance from tower signal strength amount of other users on the tower will all make a difference but look quite frankly if this is an indication of what 5g can do it's fantastic thanks again to netgear i hope if you end up getting one but you enjoy it as much as i have do a speed test too and just see if you can beat my number

Channel: Toby Travanner

Views: 62,244

Keywords: netgear, nighthawk, nighthawk m5, netgear M5, netgear nighthawk m5, netgear nighthawk, 5G, wifi, wifi 6, hotspot, Compare, M1, M2

Id: cm2DgSCWuTY

Length: 15min 15sec (915 seconds)

Published: Sun Dec 20 2020