I've always had a problem choosing ADSL modems. They've had a habit of letting me down and just being downright unreliable. As my wife works from home, reliable internet access is essential and we in the past have faced many issues with our Internet access, most of these issues being down to the BT Home Hub which for reasons only known to BT will drop the connection and suddenly choose to run an upgrade patch on itself. It did this without asking and with no thought to what important work was being done on the Internet at the time.
Other times Internet access would drop completely and the only way to get it back was to reboot the dreaded BT Home Hub. What was worse is that I had two SIP phone lines coming through my Internet connection. The BT Home Hub was awful at routing any traffic to the phones making them unreliable.
Having put up with this issue for such a long time I told myself enough was enough and decided to trawl around the Internet to find the best solution. Just about everyone complained about the popular makes of ADSL routers when reading the reviews on Amazon. Then I spotted something called a Fritz! Box on Sipgates website, it was definitely more expensive than the others but doing more research found that people had nothing but good things to say about it. I decided to see if I could get it a bit cheaper. Searching Amazon I found the above model the 7170 for £73. It appeared to be an older model, but it still had many of the features found in the newer models so I placed my order.
The Fritz!Box was simplicity itself to setup. I moved the box over to the IP range I use at home unplugged by BT Home Hub, plugged in the Fritz!Box and it just worked! So far so good, I then decided to setup my SIPGate phone numbers on the box, in order to do this I turned advanced settings on the box on first. Then I entered my SIPGate details and tested calling the numbers, they worked first time and were crystal clear! There was no need to configure any ports on the box's in built firewall everything just worked out of the box. It was the first time I had ever managed to setup a SIP device so easily. I then decided to open port 80 on the firewall for my web server and that worked without any issues. The only thing I had left was my old BT Hub Phone number, after a little bit of research I found I was able to set this up on the Fritz!Box with no problems and it also worked first time. Not bad, not bad at all..
Looking through the screens for the Fritz!Box I realised it had a lot more to offer than I thought actually came with the box. It had built in multiple answer phones, a fax machine, NAS drive interface, UPNP Media Server, USB print server interface and a VPN client! The answer phone was easy to setup and I discovered I could also route calls based on caller id. So in theory I could route calls that withhold their numbers to an answering machine as they are more than likely sales calls.
A month on and the Fritz!Box has been nothing but reliable. Where we have had Internet problems the box has seamlessly detected them and reset the Internet connection in many cases without us even realising it. I suppose the old adage, you get what you pay for is so true with the Fritz!Box. The Fritz!Box has also reminded me just how reliable German engineering really is.