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.

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.