When I first heard about the Fritz!Box, the exceptional thing was the ISDN interface. I’m living in Norway, and ISDN has been a great success here since the incumbent waited with DSL investments until most of us had gotten ISDN to dial-up the Internet.

The Fritz!Box has added up on it’s cool features, mentioning, ISDN (capable of either TE or NT mode), 2 analog ports, one analog port to connect to a phone line, DECT, USB 2.0 and WLAN (802.11 a/b/g/n (!!!)) running on its respective 2,4 and 5Ghz. No wonder AVM is starting to call it a “home server”!

I’m starting with the most important, VoIP. It is capable of three concurrent calls either direction and with several technologies. You can connect up to 8 ISDN phones in the ISDN port, several phones in both the analogue ports, and associate up to 6 DECT phones to the internal DECT base statin. But remember, only three calls at the same time, whatever technology used.

The Fritz!Box has built-in answering machine, built-in soft fax which sends the fax as a PDF in your e-mail. It lets you get rid of that fax machine and paper, thank you!

On the IP interfaces, It has ADSL2+, four (4) 10/100Mbit ports (why not 1000Mbit???). If you have cable modem or fiber connection, you can use the LAN1 port for Internet access instead of the built-in ADSL2+ port. It supports all protocols (like PPPoE, PPPoA, RFC1483 and more) needed for connecting up to an ISP.

What I really fancy, is the daily reports telling me how good my calls has been.

Internet Telephony Voice Transmission
This table shows detailed information about voice transmission during Internet telephony.
Duration (*) Remote Site Coding Packets (**) Lost Delay Jitter Burst Other
0:19 (300 ms) >| G.711 54921 (-) 0.0 % 14 ms 0 ms (0 %)


The web interface is even better. It has some really good and informative overviews of the different technologies. Here is the DECT overview:

Monitor the DECT system in the Fritz unit

The Fritz!box has a USB 2.0 USB host port. Just plug a USB harddrive into it, and you are ready. Set a (good!) password on the share and you can access it as an FTP server from all over the Internet. AVM had also added a new Samba Server feature, [delete - with a small program installed,] so you have direct access to the USB port as a network share from all of your PCs. This is excellent for a small firm that needs to share a scanner or printer.

All in all, the Fritz!box is full of technologies, enabling it to fit most of an advance home or a small firm!
I love it!