AVM Fritz!Box 7490 review

The AVM Fritz!Box 7490 is the company’s first router to use the 802.11ac Wi-Fi standard. At £250, it’s expensive even by the standard of 802.11ac routers, but it comes with a massive range of features. The Fritz!Box 7490 has a dual ADSL and VDSL modem, making it a natural upgrade if you’re not a fan of VDSL modems provided with many fibre-to-the-cabinet (FTTC) connections in the UK. You can also reconfigure the first of the router’s four Gigabit Ethernet LAN ports as a WAN port so that you can connect it to a cable modem.

That means the 7490 is compatible with all three major types of consumer broadband connection found in the UK. You can even use a USB mobile broadband dongle to get online, although we were a little disappointed to find that you can’t set up your mobile broadband dongle to take over automatically if your main internet connection fails. The 7490 is also equipped with multiple phone connections: two RJ-11 ports for standard analogue phones and an RJ-45 port for ISDN or VoIP phones. That’s in addition to the router’s support for up to six cordless DECT phones. AVM sells its own Fritz!Fon (Fritz!Fon MT-F, £68, www.amazon.co.uk) cordless phones for use as part of its IP telephony system.

It’s nice to have a VoIP server built-in to the 7490, but we suspect most people won’t make use of it. Fortunately, there are plenty more features that people will use. The USB3 port at the back can be used to connect a hard disks and flash drives so that the 7490 can act as a simple NAS device. Alternatively you could use the USB port to share a USB printer across your network. The Fritz!NAS interface provides you with basic management options that make it simple to browse your disk’s contents. You can also set access permissions on a per-user basis in the System settings screen. If you make the router’s interface accessible via the web you can even use the Fritz!NAS as a basic personal cloud server.

Once you’re used to it, the 7490 has an extremely user-friendly interface

The Fritz!Box 7490’s web interface can feel a little confusing at first, with its broad categories that encompass a wide range of settings, but everything was easy to find and there’s excellent documentation available online for everything you might wish to do. As an example, you can find detailed instructions on how to set up something similar to a demilitarised zone (DMZ) so that you can forward ports through the router’s firewall, even though the Fritz!box 7490 doesn’t support a traditional DMZ.

When it comes to performance, the 7490 did very well in our challenging network test environment, which requires routers to function in an area populated by a variety of other Wi-Fi signals. The 5GHz and 2.4GHz networks run simultaneously, and you can also set up a 2.4GHz guest network that will let users access the internet but not anything else on your network. You might want to use a guest network when you throw a party, for instance.

The 2.4GHz network uses standard 802.11n Wi-Fi and it performed well in our tests using both our laptop and AVM’s own wireless adaptor (FRITZ!WLAN USB Stick N, £52, www.cclonline.co.uk). When we connected with our laptop, the 7490 provided a quick throughput of 40.7Mbit/s at 1m and 40.3Mbit/s at 10m, but failed to complete the test at 20m. When we connected with AVM’s own adaptor the 7490 managed 45Mbit/s at 1m, 40.9Mbit/s at 10m and a stable 9.3Mbit/s at 20m.

The 5GHz network uses the 802.11ac standard to provide a theoretical maximum throughput of 1,300Mbit/s, but the 802.11ac standard is backwards compatible with 802.11n adaptors, such as those in our laptop. When connected to the 5GHz network with our laptop, the 7490 provided transfer speeds of 90.1Mbit/s at 1m, 81.3Mbit/s at 10m and a slightly disappointing 10.7Mbit/s at 20m.

As AVM was unable to supply us with an 802.11ac wireless adaptor in time for testing, we used the D-Link DWA-182 wireless adaptor (£40, www.amazon.co.uk) for the 5GHz 802.11ac part of our test. When connected through the DWA-182, we saw excellent speeds of 172.4Mbit/s at 1m and 195.7Mbit/s at 10m. The test failed at 20m, which is disappointing when you consider that the 802.11ac standard is intended to provide Wi-Fi that works over greater distances than 802.11n. However, please note that we didn’t use AVM’s own adaptor in this test. A fully compatible adaptor is likely to produce a more stable performance over distance.

The Fritz!Box 7490 is fast, feature-packed and capable, but it’s massively expensive compared to many every other 802.11ac routers. Admittedly, 802.11ac routers with a built in VDSL modem are rare, but the Ultimate award-winning Netgear R6300 costs over £100 less than this Fritz!Box and unless you have extensive IP telephony requirements it’s just as capable.