INTRODUCTION

   With this year's CES almost over the time has come for us to sit down and think about all the new devices and technologies we saw from virtually every single section/area in the electronics industry/market. Unfortunately however although 2016 will see several innovations in home automation and connectivity once again most network hardware manufacturers have "missed" the opportunity to introduce new DSL modem/router models in order to cover most consumers out there so at the end of the day even though we witnessed the unveiling of well over a dozen state of the art standalone routers (could be more that's all i recall however) there were less than half as many modem/routers present. Fortunately there are several modem/router models which we've yet to get our hands on including the latest FRITZ!Box 3490 AC1750 Gigabit Modem Router by AVM which has been with us for two weeks now.

   AVM offers a wide range of products for high-speed broadband connectivity and smart home networking. With the FRITZ! product family, AVM is a leading manufacturer of broadband devices for ADSL, cable, and LTE as well as Smart Home products for wireless LAN, DECT, and Powerline in Germany and Europe. The FRITZ!Box is the best known brand for wireless routers in Germany. In 2014 the communications specialist had 500 employees and generated a turnover of 340 million euros. Founded in Berlin in 1986, from the outset the company has focused on developing its own secure, innovative products for broadband connections. FRITZ! stands for fast Internet, the networked home and convenient telephony. Millions of satisfied customers and hundreds of award-winning products confirm AVM’s commitment to high-quality FRITZ! products and first-class customer service.

   Some of you may recall our review of the FRITZ!Box 7490 a while back which ended with very positive results and us hoping to see a replacement with even faster Wi-Fi connectivity. Well the FRITZ!Box 3490 is not that since it's basically a cut-down version of the FRITZ!Box 7490 that gets shipped without the somewhat secondary (and not so important to many) DECT base station and fixed-line telephony features. However it still packs a VDSL2/ADSL2 modem (up to 100Mbit with VDSL support for vectoring), dual-band AC1750 Wi-Fi (5GHz 1300Mbps 802.11ac and 2.4GHz 450Mbps 802.11n), 4 Gigabit LAN ports and 2 USB 3.0 ports. Under the hood of the FRITZ!Box 3490 AVM has placed a 6-band DSL System-on-Chip (SoC) by Lantiq (XWAY™ VRX288), 3-stream 802.11ac radio solution by Qualcomm Atheros (QCA9880), 6 high-gain antennas, 512MB flash memory (Toshiba in our sample) and two Winbond RAM modules (W971GG8KB-25/256MB total). With everything out of the way the time has come for us to check and see just how good (or bad) the FRITZ!Box 3490 really is.