Nighthawk M5 5G standalone (SA) support

[olavinto_]

Is the Nighthawk M5 router going to get 5G SA support? I'm from Finland and as a customer of Elisa, I've had access to their SA network for quite a while now. It is my understanding that this should be quite easily achievable with a firmware upgrade. As far as I was able to find, support has not been added.

I am fully aware that this is a discontinued product but considering its price, which was by far one of the highest (if not the highest) of its category, and the fact that it was (still kind of is) a top of the range product, I'd expect to recieve at least compatibility updates like this (or why are we paying premium for Netgear's products if they don't get premium support...?). Just as an example, the M6 (non-Pro) currently cost basically 250 € more than any other 5G router, mobile or otherwise, on the market here, and it was the same with the M5. So what are we paying extra for?

[rcpax]

While the Snapdragon X55 does support SA mode, the product page for MR5200 does say sub6 NSA. I'm not exactly sure if Netgear ever planned for SA support but the modem is definitely capable. From my experience though, T-Mobile USA network, NSA still offers the best speeds, especially on the upload side because you have that extra LTE bandwidth. The X55 does not aggregate as capably as compared to X62 or X65 ( i think it's only 2CC for the X55) and your carrier bands might be in the supported CC combo for the X55, so SA mode might not be the best to be honest.

[olavinto_]

Elisa's mobile data plans from 300 Mbps up support their SA network and I'd like to see how switching to SA would affect my current plan and if an upgrade would be beneficial. There isn't much test data available, at least not anything that would give a good idea on wether to even consider this or not. What I could find were mostly along the lines of "browsing, streaming and gaming worked fine" and all this already works just fine with my current plan but I'd like to see if I can get higher and more stable speeds (outwards too as I run a few servers) and if upgrading to a higher tier plan would be beneficial.

These Netgear prices are even crazier considering that you can get a complete 5G Wi-Fi 6 Mesh systems for under half the price, with 5G SA support. So not getting a simple switch flip firmware update to activate a dormant feature that the hardware already supports is kind of offensive. Essentially they are limiting the hardware with software and forcing customers to buy a new device to enable an already present feature. If they would bother giving a technical explanation why it isn't possible to enable this (if so), I'd be fine with it. I'd even accept it if the device was priced at under 300 € (or whatever the low range prices were at the time). But since everything points otherwise, I'm extremely annoyed. 😞