A multitude of Channel Assignment (CA) schemes have created a paradox of plenty, making CA selection for Wireless Mesh Networks (WMNs) an onerous task. CA performance prediction (CAPP) metrics are novel tools that address the problem of appropriate CA selection. However, most CAPP metrics depend upon a variety of factors such as the WMN topology, the type of CA scheme, and connectedness of the underlying graph. In this work, we propose an improved Channel Assignment Link-Weight Metric (iCALM) that is independent of these constraints. To the best of our knowledge, iCALM is the first universal CAPP metric for WMNs. To evaluate iCALM, we design two WMN topologies that conform to the attributes of real-world mesh network deployments, and run rigorous simulations in ns-3. We compare iCALMto four existing CAPPmetrics, and demonstrate that it performs exceedingly well, regardless of the CA type, and the WMN layout. © 2018 Association for Computing Machinery.