My old router had been acting up for the last few months. It was an old Speedtouch which was way past it’s time, but I hung on to it because it had served me well. WiManx, my ISP, provides me with a SIP VOIP service and the Speedtouch had the ability to terminate my SIP conenction so I could just plug a cordless phone into it and make use of the line. I did want an N wireless modem, but I didn’t want to buy separate VOIP equipment or have more boxes plugged into the network. So, when the AVM FRITZ!Box Fon WLAN 7270 – VOIP VPN WLAN Router hit my radar, I knew it was the one for me!
So, here are features I’m using on it:
- It’s an ADSL modem (ADSL 2+)
- It’s a router wireless (IEEE 802.11b, IEEE 802.11a, IEEE 802.11g, IEEE 802.11n (draft 2.0)) and wired (4 ports – 10Base-T/100Base-TX)
- It has a USB port that can be used for a network printer or a NAS device
- It has built-in VOIP supporting multiple SIP connections and PBX facilities combining SIP and land-line (and multiple answering machines)
- It has a built-in DECT phone base station so you can program any cordless phone to work with it
It has a bunch of other things I’m not using also, for example ISDN functionality and parental controls (has the ability to shut off Internet access to particular PCs at defined times), but I’m sure I’ll be exploring more of it in the future. It’s been running solid for a day now and our Internet access actually seems quicker than with the old router. Oh, and did I mention it was also a doddle to configure. It took around 10 minutes to set all the above up and most of that time was spent hunting for my ADSL username and password!
Here are some funky screenshots from the admin UI:
Much recommended!