Fritz! Box 7490, a Ferrari made in Germany.
AVM, the German market leader in Germany in the production of wireless routers, recently presented the new top of the range of the Fritz! Box family, the 7490, a wireless router equipped with all the state-of-the-art technologies for home and business networks. The Fritz! Box 7490 therefore joins the Fritz! Box 7390, of which you can find our review here, becoming the most advanced router on the market at the moment.
Before going on to indicate our opinions on the product, below we will indicate some of the most interesting technical specifications of the reviewed product, useful to give you an idea of the product class we are talking about
- VDSL and ADSL2 + routers, with vectoring support
- Support for AC standard and dual wireless AC + N
- 2 USB 2.0 / 3.0 ports useful for NAS configurations
- Telephone switchboard for VoIP, ISDN and analog lines
- Answering machine and up to 5 voice-to-mails
- Integrated fax with forwarding of received faxes to the fax-to-mail mailbox
- DECT base station to manage up to 6 cordless phones. Support HD telephony and operation mode (power saving)
- Routing functionality even when connected to a cable modem or external modem for fiber connectivity or with a UMTS key (UMTS / HSPA)
- Media server for playing music, images and videos over the network.
- CLOUD functionality
It is therefore evident that more than a wireless router, the Fritz! Box 7490 should rather be considered as the definitive hub for the organization of your digital home, also considering some SMART HOME features useful in the field of home automation. But let's proceed in order.
layout
The packaging, rather spartan for a product of this category, has remained unchanged compared to the 7390: inside the package a small quick installation manual, the cables necessary for operation (DSL + Tel cable, power supply) and an ethernet cable (useful even in the case of a firmware restore) accompany a slightly modified 7490 in design. Compared to the 7390, in fact, the dimensions have slightly increased (245x175x55mm) and the classic Ferrari red that has distinguished all Fritz! Box products has been replaced by a darker red. The Fritz! Box 7490 is equipped with a 600 MHz dual-core processor with 256 MB of RAM and separate CPUs dedicated to WiFI management, with 128 MB cache and control of DECT and USB ports. The USB ports, which turn the 7490 into a perfect device Entry level NAS, they are two and both are 3.0. The device also comes with 500MB of pre-installed flash memory that can be used for storing multimedia files or documents.
The fastest
Although some of the features mentioned above were already present in the Fritz! Box 7390, the introduction of the 802.11ac communication standard has made the FritzBox solution even more interesting for those looking for future proof performance and technologies. Thanks to the AC standard, the latest evolution of the draft for 802.11 wireless networks, it is possible to reach nominal speeds of 1.300 Mbit / s on 5GHz frequency, while on standard N (at 2.4 GHz) the nominal speed reaches 450 Mbit / s. There are three antennas and thanks to these we have been able to detect one decidedly broadening the scope of the device, with the network now accessible at 45% of its power even on the upper floor of the test station, when the 7390 stopped at 30%.
In speed test on 802.11 N standard we found very high peak speeds with the 5GHZ standard, with values that averaged 24,8 MB / s (measuring distance 2 meters and 10 meters) for the transfer of a 100mb file, while at 2,4 GHz the average speed detected is 15,3 MB / s, with a more noticeable degradation the further you get away from the router.
On the AC standard the performances degrade, due to the distance, in a less evident way compared to the N standard and the performances are attested on 40 MB / s (100mb file). According to these results, the 7490 is the fastest Fritz! Box currently on the market.
NAS and Media Server
The two USB 3.0 ports, the 500MB internal memory and the integrated multimedia server make it possible to use the Fritz! Box 7490 also as a device for creating a network for managing your video and audio archive, as well as of course for creation of a Personal Cloud, to be managed through the excellent app (iOS and Android) MyFritz. The only limitation to a 7490 NAS use is in the size of the files stored on the media server which cannot exceed 2GB. Finally, the 7490 supports file systems Fat, Fat32 and NTFS for external disks, while the supported communication protocols are SMB / SAMBA, UPnP, FTP. Mac's AFP protocol not yet supported.
Via USB the performance is quite good with data transfer speeds that are around 11 MB / s (100MB file; average speed with distance between 2 and 10 meters).
Telephony and FritzOS
One of the most interesting features of the FritzBox 7390 was certainly the ability to manage home or company telephony in a decidedly professional and advanced way. The Fritz! Box 7490 not only matches its predecessor in terms of functionality, it even improves its performance.
With the 7490 you can connect well 6 cordless DECT, a traditional telephone with cable and a fax. The quality of the HD calls it is always crystal clear and we did not feel any annoying echo effects. Also using a FritzFON MT-F we got an audio always ch
Even when our ADSL network, certainly not a sliver, was congested or busy downloading and uploading. The credit certainly goes to an excellent prioritization system for IP telephony or other network applications, completely customizable by the user.
But the real Killer Functionality of the 7490, and in general of all the products of the German brand, is the extraordinary FritzOS which allows you to access the immense number of features of the device with incredible ease. The system, for example, provides very detailed information on the performance of your internet network, helps to set the SNR settings of the ADSL network (with 4 different options that can be selected from "maximum performance" to "maximum stability"), to identify interference between different wireless devices and to set the communication band (2.4GHz or 5 GHz). It is also able to better manage the telephony of your home or company, with the ability to select blacklists, "sleep" times, message forwarding, answering machine, voice to mail, to manage multiple telephone lines, whether they are VOIP, ISDN or traditional.
In addition to the extraordinary potential of FritzOS, now in version 6.01, there are also the numerous apps released by AVM to expand or enhance the functions of the 7490 such as FRITZ! App Fon, for Android and iPhone, which allows you to use your mobile phone as an IP phone, the MyFRITZ! App we have already mentioned, to access the NAS functionalities of the device, or FRITZ! App Media, reserved for Android and for managing your own multimedia collection on PCs or disks (including virtual ones) connected to the FRITZ! Box. Furthermore, the same app is able to transform the Android device into a remote control for content playback on stereo systems or televisions connected to the network.
Last interesting app that we recommend you to download is FRITZ! App WLAN Lab with which it is possible to automatically record the images of what happens in front of the camera of your mobile phone and store them on a site. The owner can then access this site with any browser, from the home network or remotely via the internet with MyFRITZ !.
Conclusions and judgment
Fritz! Box 7490 is the ultimate solution for managing your digital world. Internet, home network, telephony, multimedia, Cloud, are just some of the fields in which the device excels, providing cutting-edge solutions in a single red box. The price of 280 euros, very high, is however justified by the number of devices that the product is able to replace, first of all a NAS server.
If you are looking for a state-of-the-art solution for your network and a complete system that acts as a digital hub for your home / office / business and you have no budget problems, the Fritz! Box 7490 is definitely the product for you. for you.
