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Fritz!Box 7530 AX review

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A photo of the Fritz!Box 7530 AX

As is usual when you sign up to a new Internet Service Provider, we were offered a new router as well. We signed up with Zen Internet, who unlike their larger rivals, don’t offer their own branded router hardware. Instead, we’ve now got a Fritz!Box 7530 AX as our home router.

Fritz! devices are more common in mainland Europe – Fritz! is a German company – and Zen are one of the few ISPs that offer their devices in the UK. Indeed, their UK range is much smaller than the range available elsewhere in Europe, where you can also buy Fritz! branded smart plugs.

Connectivity

As for the Fritz!Box 7530 AX, the ‘AX’ indicates that it supports 802.11ax, better known as Wi-Fi 6. It’s ‘standard’ Wi-Fi 6, not the enhanced Wi-Fi 6E, so it uses the 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz bands only. Still, it’s an upgrade over our previous Google Nest Wi-Fi system which only supported Wi-Fi 5. As well as Wi-Fi, you get 4 Gigabit Ethernet ports, and a USB port which can be used for media sharing. It should be noted, however, that you’ll need to use one of these Ethernet ports to connect to the Optical Network Terminal, if you have fibre broadband.

Another difference with our previous Google Nest Wi-Fi system is that there’s no Thread support. This means I just have the one Thread border router now, which a USB dongle plugged into my Home Assistant Green. There is a newer Fritz!Boz, the 7690, which supports Wi-Fi 7 and Zigbee, but this is what Zen offered to us.

If we opted to have a Digital Voice Line, then we could plug our landline phone into the Fritz!Box, and it supports IP-based DECT phones as well.

Design

The design of the Fritz!Box is, frankly, a little dated. It feels like it’s made of quite cheap plastic, and I’m not a fan of the colour scheme. But to be fair, it lives in our spare room, so we don’t actually need to see it very much. It can be wall-mounted, if needed – there are a couple of screw hooks on the bottom.

All the ports are on one side, except for the USB port which is at the top.

What it’s like to use

All Fritz!Box devices ship with Fritz!OS, which is their custom Linux distro. There’s a web-based interface, and apps for iOS and Android. In fact, there are several apps – one for managing the device itself, and one for testing the Wi-Fi signal.

The web interface is pretty good, and gives you a lot of control over the box and your home network. Indeed, it was very good at showing a network topology, including those devices connected via my Powerline adaptors. Plus, the web address is ‘fritz.box’ which is nice and easy to remember.

It supports the creation of a separate guest network, which appears as a separate Wi-Fi network (SSID) to your own, and can be open or secured with a separate password.

Wi-Fi speeds and coverage

In the couple of weeks that we’ve had the Fritz!Box, the speed and coverage of the Wi-Fi signal has been excellent. There hasn’t been anywhere in our house where I’ve noticed any issues. How much of that is down specifically to the Fritz!Box, and how much is due to improvements in Wi-Fi 6 over Wi-Fi 5, I’m unsure. But either way, I’m happy with the connectivity that we’re getting.

Something I will pass on is a comment our Openreach engineer made; Fritz!Box devices don’t seem to like a change from being a DSL router to a router connected to a fibre ONT. Not a problem for us, as we’re already on with fibre, but something to bear in mind if you’re considering one and don’t have full fibre yet.

Home Assistant integration

When I first connected my Home Assistant Green to the Fritz!Box, it found several new devices. These included UPnP and DLNA, which come up when you connect most routers, but also two Fritz! specific integrations: Fritz! Smart Home and Fritz!Box Tools. Of these, the second is most useful, as it allows you to control whether individual devices on your network have Internet access, or whether they’re at home or away. This may result in a large number of devices appearing in your Home Assistant install, however, on those where the devices’ MAC address is available in the integration, the device will be shared and only appear once. That means that my ESPHome devices show as both ESPHome and Fritz! devices with the controls combined. It’s not perfect – my Matter devices show up twice, for example – but it allows you to track where devices like phones without having location services on.

Verdict

So, should you get a Fritz!Box? It’s certainly a very capable router with good Wi-Fi performance, and lots of settings for expert users to access. The web interface is clean and simple to use. However, the design is a bit dated, and there are some nice-to-have features that would make it better if they were included.

As I mentioned earlier, ours came with our Zen broadband package, but you can buy a Fritz!Box from Amazon if you wish (sponsored link). They’re about £145 for the 7530 AX model.

Zen also offer Eero Wi-Fi routers on their faster full fibre packages; I haven’t tested one, but they do look nicer. Eero is owned by Amazon, and is the major competitor to Google Wi-Fi.

Achieving a state of internet Zen

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Screenshot of the Zen internet home page

So, following on from our full fibre (FTTP) broadband installation, we also switched to a new internet provider: Zen Internet.

Zen is one of the oldest Internet Service Providers (ISP) in the UK, having been founded 30 years ago, and in that time it has resisted being bought out by a larger rival. It remains one of the smaller players in the UK ISP market, but has a reputation for offering a better standard of service – it’s been Which magazine’s recommended provider for five years running, for example. A friend of mine who works in IT also uses them at home, and recommended them.

In the past, I’ve considered Zen, but found other companies to be cheaper. However, they now offer fibre-only packages (without a digital voice line) that are only a little more expensive than the mainstream providers, and so we’ve signed up.

Our previous provider was Vodafone. They were cheap, but the service wasn’t the best – a number of small outages here and there, but a big one in October was quite disruptive. Pre-2020, I would have put up with the occasional outage, but now that I work from home 2-3 days per week, and use video conferencing almost every day, I need a reliable home broadband service.

A screenshot of Ookla Speedtest results for our Zen home broadband connection

Broadband speeds

So, do Zen internet offer their advertised speeds? In my experience yes – eventually. Part of the reason why I’ve held off writing this for a couple of weeks is to give our internet speed time to settle. When your line is first installed, speeds can fluctuate for the first week or so.

I’ve shared a screenshot of a Ookla Speedtest result above – it shows that we’re getting about 105 Mbps download, and 20 Mbps download. Which is roughly the fastest advertised speeds that we should be getting. We were coping well with 80 Mbps before and so I didn’t see a reason to pay for much faster speeds. Zen apparently offers a 2 Gbps package, which I suppose is great if your household has four teenagers all running separate Twitch streams, but it would be overkill for us.

So far, I’ve been happy with Zen, but as we’ve only had the service a couple of weeks, it’s perhaps too early for a full review. The contract is for 18 months, so I’ll see if I’m still thinking positively with them in late spring 2027.