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Tech Adviser review

The Fritz!Box 7530 looks fairly unremarkable, but it does manage to squeeze a wide range of features into a compact
design that is well suited for use at home. A simple set of green LED indicators provide useful feedback when you’re
setting the router up, and a series of buttons on the front panel allow you to quickly turn the Wi-Fi signal on or off, or to
connect your devices using the WPS (Wi-Fi protected setup) option.

The router itself provides dual-band 802.11ac Wi-Fi using the 2.4GHz and 5GHz bands, with a maximum throughput of
1266Mbps – although, as always, the real-world performance will be rather less than that. The DSL connector on the back
will work with ADSL broadband connections, as well as the newer ADSL2+ and VDSL.

There are four Gigabit Ethernet ports on the back of the router for wired connections, along with a USB port for connect-
ing a printer or storage devices, and the router can also act as a DECT base-station for up to six cordless telephones that
can be used for voice-over-Internet (VOIP) telephone calls – including AVM’s own range of Fritz!Fon handsets.

There’s even a ‘FON’ socket that will allow you to connect an analogue telephone, answering machine or fax machine for
office use.

This is where the Fritz!Box 7530 really stands out, as the Fritz!OS operating system that controls the router is specifically
designed to support features such as VOIP telephony, mesh networking and media streaming. To support those features,
AVM provides a number of different apps for smartphones and mobiles – although we did find that the various Fritz!
apps lean a little more towards the Android side of the fence, rather than Apple’s iOS devices.