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

The AVM FRITZ!Box 5690 Pro is another solid router from the company. With the addition of the 6GHz waveband offering so much performance potentially available, we were expecting it to be a little quicker, but you are still benefiting from WiFi 7. This will come into its own as more supporting devices emerge – they are still quite few and far between at the time of writing. Then there is the comprehensive and almost unique telephony and smart home capabilities as well. We suspect that fast 6GHz band will be particularly handy if you add further AVM devices to make a mesh, too.

Of course, the other headline act is the built-in support for fibre broadband. If you buy fibre to the home from BT, you will get a modem as standard but will have to use that with BT's own router. The 5690 Pro surpasses that greatly in capabilities, and has solid standard features including the four-port Gigabit Ethernet switch and USB 3 for storage sharing. If you don't have fibre, there's a built-in ADSL modem and 2.5Gbits/sec WAN for cable as well.

The 5690 Pro is a little more expensive than the 7690 we tested at the beginning of the year, but if you do have fibre broadband it could be worth the extra. While the NETGEAR Nighthawk RS300 still holds our WiFi 7 performance crown, the AVM FRITZ!Box 5690 Pro provides lots of features for small businesses and smart homes on top of a solid set of capabilities for your everyday networking needs, making it well worth considering.

The AVM FRITZ!Box 5690 Pro is available from Amazon UK for £356.32 inc VAT.

Pros:

• Decent WiFi 7 performance.
• Built in DECT and analog telephony.
• Zigbee Smart home device support.
• 2.5Gbit Ethernet WAN (or LAN).
• Four-port Gigabit Ethernet LAN switch.
• Mesh WiFi capability with additional units.
• USB 3 connection for storage and media server sharing.
• Solid WiFi 6 and 5 performance at 5m or less.
• Feature-rich management interface.

Cons:

• Not as quick as we'd hoped with the 6GHz waveband.
• WiFi 5 and 6 performance drops noticeably at range.
• Mediocre WiFi 4 throughput.

KitGuru says: The AVM FRITZ!Box 5690 Pro offers the company's commendable rich feature set, including telephony and smart home control, with fibre broadband support and solid, if not exceptional WiFi 7 performance, making it an attractive future-proofed router for home and small office users.

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