The Next Net

Two weeks ago, I bought a AVM Fritz!Box WLAN 7050 DSL router to replace my ageing Zyxel one. The Zyxel was not a real choice at the time (4 years ago). It was the only one that the incumbent operator was willing to support. Believe it or not, P&T Luxembourg was still selling the thing last year, despite the fact that it did not support WPA encryption.

The Fritz!Box is the leading DSL router on the German market and AVM has a killer product. It is slowly spreading outside Germany. As I understand, the manufacturer is struggling to meet the demand outside Germany and does not have the production capacities of competitors like Linksys or D-Link. Too bad, because AVM beats them all.

Not only does it do what you expect, ie route your home computer to the Internet. It also does VoIP and can manage multiple SIP providers. It has 3 phone connectors and an ISDN one. Hence, you can use your usual desktop phones to make calls through the Internet and assign dialing rules so outgoing calls can go either through you usual fixed line or through the Internet, depending on what number you dial.

Overall, I am pretty satisfied. The web interface makes the the box very easy to manage. I am amazed at what AVM managed to put in such a small unit. Some minus points, though. You cannot configure your default DNS and NTP servers, nor can you assign a static address through DHCP.

The latter is problematic with my home printer (HP Officejet 7140), which has a statically assigned IP address. The Fritz first tries to configure the printer by DHCP and assigns the WPA key. However, since the printer has a static address, the key becomes somehow invalid. If I enter the WPA key again on the printer, it will work for some time. Now, entering 12 letter passwords on a printer control panel is a real nightmare you do not want to face every few hours.

The box runs an embedded version of Linux on a Texas Instruments AR7 processor. That makes it easy to hack, although of course the manufacturer will void its warranty in such a case. Some people managed to do unbelievable things, like converting a PSTN model to ISDN or change an German model to an international one. I limited myself to installing a ssh daemon and opened some more ports on the firewall, which are not configurable through the web interface.
VoIP is still unreliable, in my case. I do not know if I have to blame the Fritz!Box or my SIP provider, VoIPBuster.com. Some calls get through fine. For others, it rings but there is no sound. It will need another week end to test and debug. Missing codecs, I guess.