Great performance and a fantastic web interface make this a Best Buy
Written By
Published on 14 August 2013
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best buy
1 / 5
Our rating
Reviewed price £119 inc VAT
The AVM Fritz!box 3390 is a dual-band ADSL and VDSL modem router with four Gigabit Ethernet ports and two USB ports. It allows concurrent use of both the 2.4GHz and 5GHz bands, so you can connect using the best band for your device, whether it’s an iPad or a smart TV.
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As this is a Fritz!box, it has an excellent web interface that’s clear, uncluttered, well laid out and packed with genuinely helpful text. It even displays graphs that show you which wireless channels are the most congested so you can change channels to improve performance if need be. When you first log in you’re shown a “Standard” view, which presents users with a basic set of options. You can’t for example, give the 2.4GHz band and 5GHz band connections distinguishing SSIDs. You can, however, enable “Advanced” view, which then lets you set different SSIDs for the two bands and configure Dynamic DNS to give two examples. Setting up internet access for your guests, so that they can access the internet but nothing else on your network, is easy
Thanks to its great web interface, the Fritz!box 3390 is easy to set up. Annoyingly, however, only one Ethernet port works as a Gigabit Ethernet port initially. According to the Fritz!Box 3390, this is to conserve power. The other three Ethernet ports are set to Fast Ethernet speeds and you must manually set the others to Gigabit Ethernet speeds if you want to use them as such. This isn’t too much trouble, but we think it should be the way other round, with users having to reduce Ethernet speed rather than increase it.The Fritz!Box 3390 uses easy to understand bar charts to show you the wireless congestion and the best Wi-Fi channel to use
We were certainly impressed with its Wi-Fi performance. We initially connected to the Fritz!Box 3390 on the 2.4GHz band with our laptop’s built-in Wi-Fi adaptor. The router produced data transfer speeds of 41.9Mbit/s at one metre, 36Mbit/s at 10 metres and 10.5Mbit/s at 25 metres. These scores are good, but not the best we’ve seen. However, its performance improved greatly when we connected to the router on the 5GHz band, with the Fritz!Box 3390 producing speeds of 104.9Mbit/s at one metre, 93.2Mbit/s at 10 metres and 28.1Mbit/s at 25 metres. These are cracking speeds.
The speed improved further when we used the AVM Fritz!WLAN Wi-Fi dongle. We connected on the 5GHz band and the 3390 produced speeds of 139.8Mbit/s at one metre, 119.8Mbit/s at 10 metres and 24.3Mbit/s at 25 metres.
The Fritz!Box 3390 is a great router, especially so if you’re using the 5GHz band and value a web interface that presents you with the information you need in a clear, uncomplicated fashion. It wins a Best Buy award.
Written by
Andrew Unsworth
When he isn't pretending to be Carl Cox or J-Rocc on his wheels, Andrew can be found sorting out his wife's IT problems, screaming profanity when people ring him during Game of Thrones and worrying about getting old. He writes reviews about all manner of computing products for Expert Reviews and Computer Shopper, and is expanding the Car Tech section in his spare moments.
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