AVM FRITZ!Box 5690 Pro WiFi 7 Router Review

1. Introduction2. AVM FRITZ!Box 5690 Pro3. AVM FRITZ!Box 5690 Pro Administration Interface4. AVM FRITZ!Box 5690 Pro Analysis5. Closing Thoughts6. View All Pages

AVM's boxes are always colourful, possibly even quite cheerful. There's also lots of useful information about the capabilities of the router inside.

You get quite a lot in the box with the AVM FRITZ!Box 5690 Pro. Aside from the requisite power supply (ours was European, because our unit was sent from Germany), there is a full suite of cables included. You get SFPs for AON and GPON fibre optics, plus a 4m optical cable. Then there's a 4m DSL cable and a 1.5m LAN cable. In other words, you've got everything you need out of the box.

Whereas the 7690 has a wave-like roundedness, the 5690 Pro is more brick-like, although it still has the characteristic AVM FRITZ!Box flashes of red around the edges. There are status lights on one corner and at the top buttons for WPS device connection and turning the WLAN off and on.

Apart from the single USB 3.1 port on the side, all the ports are deeply recessed at the bottom. Starting from the left, there's the SFP port for using one of the two fibre optic adapters. Next along is a connector for copper wire DSL, and then an RJ11 analog telephony port. Above that is the German TAE telephony port, which probably won't be much use in the UK.

Then there's a 2.5Gbit Ethernet port that could be used for a cable modem. If you don't need it for a WAN, it can be used as a high-bandwidth LAN connection. Otherwise, there's a four-port Gigabit Ethernet switch next door, so you get plenty of options for connecting wired networking devices.

Acer Swift 14 AI WiFi 7 Laptop

For testing the latest WiFi 7 wireless networking, Acer sent us its Swift 14 AI notebook, based around a Qualcomm Snapdragon X Plus Oryon X1P-64-100 CPU. This is a ten-core processor running at up to 3.4GHz across all cores, although without a single-core boost frequency (you need the X1P-66-100 for that). Our sample was supplied with 16GB of LPDDR5x memory and a 1TB SSD. Although this is an ARM-based laptop, it can still run Windows 11 and our standard WiFi testing software, iPerf3. It's a solid choice for road warriors who need to spend days away from a reliable power source, thanks to a 26-hour battery life.

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