By Adam Turner
With a super-fast 802.11ac wi-fi revamp, the flagship FRITZ!Box 7490 is the Swiss Army knife of prosumer modem/routers.
The FRITZ!Box 7490 is the successor to the two-year old FRITZ!Box 7390, which really raised the bar in terms of features to expect from a small/home office router. Home users with basic needs will naturally baulk at the new FRITZ!Box's $429 price tag and rightly so – even though you'll find it cheaper online. It's definitely overkill if you only need a basic wi-fi-enabled modem/router to support a handful of devices around your home. But if you're a power user looking for one with the lot, the FRITZ!Box 7490 should certainly be on your shortlist.
The Fritz!Box 7490 is an 802.11ac wi-fi modem/router with the lot.
Support for dual Voice over IP lines makes the FRITZ!Box 7490 attractive for those looking to embrace VoIP at home, perhaps using the second line for a home office. There's Quality of Service to give voice data priority and PSTN fallback if your VoIP line goes down. But the feature which helps it stand out from the crowd is support for DECT digital cordless phones, which cope better with local interference than analogue cordless phones.
The FRITZ!Box can act as a base station for up to six DECT handsets, using either Fritz's own DECT handsets or third-party handsets. You've the ability to transfer calls between handsets and make internal calls, as well as set up call diversions and do not disturb times.
Along with your PSTN phone line, you can manage multiple VoIP numbers and assign them to different handsets. There are also Android and iOS apps which can make and receive calls. You can create multiple voicemail boxes and have your messages emailed to you, or else access them via the FRITZ!Box's web interface. As the icing on the cake, the FRITZ!Box can also act as a fax machine.
Of course none of this is news if, like me, you own the Fritz!Box 7390. The headline improvement with the new 7490 is 802.11ac wi-fi, which runs at 5GHz and is backwards compatible. There's dual-band support so you can run a 2.4GHz network at the same time for legacy devices. You can also set up a limited guest network.
When the NBN finally arrives on your doorstep, or you're shunted onto an HFC cable network, you can use one of the four Gigabit Ethernet ports as a Gigabit WAN connection to connect to an external modem without sacrificing speed. Until then, the FRITZ!Box can use your copper line and act as an ADSL2+ or VDSL modem. There's also support for 3G/4G USB dongles for tapping into mobile broadband.
According to the spec sheet 802.11ac wi-fi has a theoretical maximum throughput of 1300 Mbps but, as with all theoretical maximums, you'll never approach that in the real world. At a range of 1 metre, connected to an 802.11ac-enabled MacBook Air, I clocked data transfer speeds of 309 Mbps. That's more than triple the speed of my my old FRITZ!Box 7390, which can only muster 92 Mbps over 802.11n 5GHz.
Breaking the 300 Mbps barrier is a respectable speed for an 802.11ac router, but you will find others which are a little faster such as Apple's Airport Extreme. You will also find others with a stronger signal, such as D-Link's DIR-880L, which might be important if you struggle with wi-fi blackspots due to the design of your home or office. If this sounds like you, you might do better with an 802.11ac router like the Apple or D-Link which supports "beamforming". This lets the router deliver a stronger signal to distant devices. Keep in mind that 2.4GHz signals penetrate walls better than 5GHz, so switching to a supposedly slower network can actually improve the performance if you're far from the router.
Dip into the settings and you find that the new FRITZ!Box 7490 comes preinstalled with the easy-to-use Fritz!OS6 interface, which is also available as an update for the 7390. The update for the old FRITZ!Box was rather generous and nothing separates the 7390 and 7490 in terms of software features. You'll find support for VPN connections, static routing and Dynamic DNS – handy options which are sometimes missing from budget modems.
To keep things humming along the new Fritz!Box ups the processor from 500MHz to 600MHz and doubles the RAM to 256MB. It's also upgraded to USB3.0 ports for shared printers and storage. The move to faster USB3.0 support is welcome if you're relying on your modem/router as Network Attached Storage and there's built-in DLNA support. It's a handy option but if it's going to be the heart of your home entertainment system there will probably come a time when you're ready to upgrade to a standalone NAS, perhaps something with a powerful Intel processor from the likes of Synology or Netgear.
While it seems like overkill for many homes, the FRITZ!Box 7490 offers more advanced parental controls than you'll find on most consumer-grade routers. You can configure settings for individual devices or groups – with options such as allocating bandwidth allowances, setting time limits, filtering websites and blocking applications.
So what's the verdict? The speed boost of 802.11ac is tempting, but you'll only benefit if you own compatible devices. The new wi-fi standard has only been available in high-end notebooks and smartphones for the last 18 months or so. If none of your current gear supports 802.11ac it's probably worth waiting to until you upgrade that before before upgrading your modem/router – at which point it might be cheaper. Remember your broadband connection is the bottleneck, so you'll only see the speed boost when shuffling or streaming files around your home/office.
Regardless of wi-fi speeds, if you won't be using any of the voice features then the Fritz!Box 7490 is almost certainly overkill and you'll find better value for money elsewhere. You'd only invest in the new Fritz!Box if you're chasing advanced VoIP features and you're ready to make the leap to 802.11ac. If this sounds like your home or small office, then this might be your one modem/router to rule them all.
Read more posts from Adam Turner's Gadgets on the Go blog.