AVM Fritz!Box Fon WLAN 7390 review

AVM may not be well-known in the UK, but the German company's latest wireless router is packed full of telephony features. Should smaller businesses and branch offices buy it? Kat Orphanides and Andrew Webb take a closer look.

IT Pro Verdict

Although its wireless performance is somewhat underwhelming, it's not bad enough to make us any less impressed by this router, although you might want to invest in an additional wireless access point if you want to extend a 2.4GHz network over a wide area that suffers from significant interference.For the small office requiring internet access and phone services in a single device, the Fritz!Box Fon WLAN 7390 is ideal. Simple to use and full of features, it lets you effectively handle almost all your office communications needs with a single compact device.

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The 7390's wireless setup interface provides much more information than most routers to help you get the best performance out of your wireless network. You can choose to leave all the settings up to the device, or specify them manually. It provides a full site survey for each band, displayed as an easy to interpret graph that clearly shows which channels will suffer the least interference. The graph not only showed which channels were in use by nearby devices, but also which other channels were affected by local signals or interference.

This is incredibly useful if you want to ensure a stable Wi-Fi network. Unfortunately, the router's wireless performance is rather poor. In an area of dense 2.4GHz congestion, we got a maximum speed of 36.6Mbit/s, but at distances of over 10m we saw speeds drop to around 14Mbit/s. Performance on the less cluttered 5GHz frequency was significantly better, producing speeds of up to 76Mbit/s that remained fairly consistent over distance.

K.G. Orphanides
K.G. Orphanides

K.G. is a journalist, technical writer, developer and software preservationist. Alongside the accumulated experience of over 20 years spent working with Linux and other free/libre/open source software, their areas of special interest include IT security, anti-malware and antivirus, VPNs, identity and password management, SaaS infrastructure and its alternatives.

You can get in touch with K.G. via email at reviews@kgorphanides.com.

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