The Meshforce M7 ($259) is a three-piece Wi-Fi 5 mesh system designed to eliminate wireless dead spots in your home. It consists of three low-profile nodes and is easy to configure and manage. It offers basic parental control and QoS options, but it’s not the fastest performer out there and you don’t get a lot of management settings or malware protection. For $70 more, our Editors’ Choice award winner, the Asus ZenWiFi AC CT8, offers superior performance over a similar coverage area, robust parental controls, anti-malware tools, and USB connectivity.
Good for Tight Spaces
The M7 is a tri-band mesh system that uses three nodes to provide coverage in homes of up to 6,000 square feet (2,000 square feet per node). The white cylindrical nodes are identical and measure 4.5 inches high by 5.2 inches wide. There’s a silver ornamental disc on the top of each node and a small LED indicator on the front, just beneath the Meshforce logo, which glows solid green when the internet connection is good, pulses green during setup, glows solid white when the internet connection is fair, and glows solid red when there is no internet connection.
The base holds a gigabit WAN port and two gigabit LAN ports, a power jack, and a reset button. The M7 lacks the USB ports that you get with the Asus ZenWiFi AC CT8, and it doesn’t support link aggregation or multi-gig LAN connectivity.
Each node contains a dual-core CPU, 256MB of RAM, four internal antennas, and 802.11ac circuitry that supports MU-MIMO (simultaneous data streaming), beamforming (direct to client data transmissions), and band steering (the router decided which bands to use). This is an AC2100 system that can reach (theoretical) data rates of up to 300Mbps on the 2.4GHz radio band and up to 867Mbps on each of the two 5GHz bands. One of the 5GHz bands is dedicated to wireless backhaul, but you can free up that band if you use a wired backhaul configuration.
The system comes with basic parental controls that allow you to create profiles for family members and assign access schedules for each profile. You can also pause internet access with the touch of a button, but you can’t block specific sites and there are none of the age-specific filters that you get with the Gryphon Guardian and Asus ZenWiFi AC systems. Moreover, the M7 doesn’t come with anti-malware software, a feature found in many mesh systems.
The M7 uses the My Mesh mobile app for Android and iOS devices. It opens to a My WiFi screen with a network map and internet upload and download speeds. Tap any node on the map to see which clients are connected to it and to view information such as connection quality, online status, IP and MAC addresses, and firmware version. Tap the Devices tab to view client details such as connection type (wired, wireless), IP and MAC addresses, and online duration time.
The Settings button at the bottom takes you to a screen where you can adjust the date and time, add more mesh nodes, enable fast roaming, and create port forwarding rules. Wireless settings allow you to change the SSID and password, but that’s all you can do. There are no encryption settings, channel settings, or settings that allow you to split the Wi-Fi radio bands. QoS settings are also sparse; you can set bandwidth limitations, but there are no presets for gaming, video streaming, and downloading like the QoS settings that come with TP-Link’s Deco X60 AX3000.
Mixed Performance
To install the M7, you can watch a video tutorial that walks you through the process or follow the written and in-app instructions. Either way, the installation was easy in my testing.
I started by downloading the My Mesh mobile app and connecting one of the nodes to my modem. I powered up the node and used my phone’s Wi-Fi settings to connect to the router’s SSID, then entered the password (located on the base of each node) and tapped Setup in the app. The app identified the internet connection type (DHCP), so I tapped Next, gave the new network a name and password, and waited a few seconds for the network to be created.
I then connected my phone to the new network and proceeded to add the other two nodes. To do this all I had to do was tap Next, place the first satellite node in position, and power it up. Once the LED stopped flashing green, I verified that it was glowing solid green (indicating a good connection) and tapped OK. I repeated this with the second satellite and the installation was finished.
Although the M7 turned in decent speeds on our throughput performance tests, it couldn’t always keep pace with the competition. The router node’s speed of 435Mbps on our close-proximity (same room) test was 65Mbps slower than the EnGenius ESR580 Tri-Band and the Zyxel Multy X (both scored 501Mbps), as well as 114Mbps slower than our leader, the Asus ZenWiFi AC CT8 (549Mbps). On the 30-foot test, the M7 scored 205Mbps, beating the EnGenius ESR580 (198Mbps), but not the Zyxel Multy X (226Mbps) or the Asus ZenWiFi CT8 (228Mbps).
The M7 satellite node (323Mbps) outperformed the EnGenius ESR580 node (222Mbps) on the close-proximity test, but came up short against the Zyxel Multy X (371Mbps) and Asus ZenWiFi CT8 satellites (441Mbps). Similarly, the M7 satellite’s speed of 298Mbps was faster than the EnGenius ESR580 satellite (178Mbps), but slower than the Zyxel Multy X (277Mbps) and Asus ZenWiFi CT8 satellites (329Mbps).
We use an Ekahau Sidekick Wi-Fi diagnostic device and Ekahau’s Survey mobile app to generate a heat map that displays wireless signal strength throughout our test home (Note: Ekahau is owned by J2 Global, the parent company of Ziff Davis, the publisher of PCMag.com.)
The darker green areas on the map indicate the strongest signal measurements, and lighter green and yellow areas show a weaker signal. The circles represent the location of the router and the satellite node. As illustrated on the map above, the M7 does a fairly good job of delivering a strong signal in rooms where a node is located, but it had trouble maintaining a strong signal in the bedroom on the lower left portion of the map.
Not a Standout
The Meshforce M7 is easy to install and comes with basic parental controls, but it’s not quite as fast as competing mesh systems and its Wi-Fi settings are severely limited. Moreover, it lacks malware protection and USB connectivity. You’ll get a lot more bang for your buck with the Asus ZenWiFi AC CT8. It’s a bit more expensive, but it offers superior throughput and signal performance, comes with lifetime anti-malware and parental controls, and each component has a USB port, so it remains our Editors’ Choice winner for Wi-Fi 5 mesh systems.
