Fritzboz 7530 Question

Hello all,

I am wanting to find out if anyone else is having problems with their Fritzbox 7530 locking up regularly and requiring rebooting?

For several months now I have been using my Zen allocated Fritzbox 7530 as a switch and 5GHz WiFi access point only, in my lounge, because my trusty Zyxel SBG3300 has better sync speed on my FTTC connection to an ECI cabinet.

The Zyxel only has 2.4GHz WiFi capability and I wanted to have some 5GHz coverage iin the lounge due to the amount of congestion on 2.4GHz from neighbours' routers.

The Fritzbox is Cat5e connected back to the Zyxel and I also have my Smart TV connected by cable into the Fritzbox. Static IP addresses are allocated to the Zyxel & Fritzbox.

Over the past 3 weeks when my family have complained about slow Internet speeds, I have found that a reboot of the Fritzbox only has solved the issue. I am thinking that either the Smart TV is recently overloading the Fritzbox with access requests or that an issue has developed with the Fritzbox.

Thanks

Edited by ToneDeaf (Sun 03-May-20 12:03:53)

Been using my Fritzbox for 14 months, no issues, but less complex set up than yours. My Fritz is hardwired to a Dell desktop, and provides wireless access to a Samsung smart telly, Sky box plus mini box (connected to a Panasonic telly), plus various iPhones.

Any problems I have are down to SKY, but that's another story for another day.

Thanks for your input.

It happened again yesterday and I noticed that the relevant LAN socket on my Zyxel router was indicating a high level of traffic from the Fritzbox after I had logged out of the YouTube app on the Samsung TV.

So, I think that some of the TV apps may be feeding excessive data back to the "dark side" or the apps are not closing correctly. Anyway, something is happening which totally takes over the Fritzbox resulting in poor wireless performance.

I will keep testing and report my findings

Edited by ToneDeaf (Mon 04-May-20 19:14:29)

I haven’t had any problems with my 7530 either, and I have been throwing quite a lot at it. I’m largely not using the built-in Wifi though so perhaps that is an area with problems. Otherwise much better than most of the routers I have had the misfortune of using over the years.

If you don't plan to use the DSL or Voice functionality, you could try flashing OpenWRT on it.

The drawback is if it IS defective and still under warranty, you'd probably need to flash it back before they would replace it.

No problems with my FB7530 on my FTTC connection with WIFI and LAN ports used. No smart TV but do run NAS and plane tracking apps as well as a FB4040 working as a Mesh repeater. Presumably the 7530 is configured as an access point rather than router with DNS and DHCP server disabled?

Yes - flashing with OpenWRT is an option that I will consider.

I'm not worried about warranty as the Fritz was free from Zen when I renewed my contract.

Yes the Fritzbox is configured as an "IP Client" which is the mode in the settings menu for making it a slave of another Gateway device. All Mesh and upnp settings have been turned off.

The Zyxel Gateway settings have been manually inputted into the Fritzbox and DHCP is inactive.

Once again this evening, after a short watch of iPlayer on the Samsung TV the same behaviour appeared (prolonged data transfer activity from the Fritzbox back to the Zyxel LAN port) and my wife could not access the Internet via WiFi through the Fritzbox.

I disconnected and reconnected the patch cable from the Fritzbox to the Zyxel router in order to reset the connection and Internet access via the WiFi connection was restored again. Note - the WiFi signal does not disappear, it's just that WiFi connected devices cannot access the Internet when this behaviour appears.

This evening, I Google'd information about what data Samsung Smart TVs can collect and report back on and I discovered that settings for data collection and voice recognition were enabled in the Support/Terms & Policy menu on my TV.

I have now disabled these options and will see if things improve.

Edited by ToneDeaf (Mon 04-May-20 23:26:30)

A further update on my issue.

After re-checking the network menus on the Fritzbox last night, I noticed that the "Mesh Networking" graphic was indicating that the 2 routers were connected together at 100MB/s. I remember that this was originally showing a 1GB/s inter-connection when I first installed this arrangement.

I rechecked all cable connections and found that the Ethernet plug was not fully pushed home into the lounge wall LAN socket (which connects back to my Zyxel Gateway)!! I have been redecorating the lounge and the TV cabinet has been in and out of the corner several times over previous weekends! Once the plug was clicked fully into the wall socket the 1GB/s connection was re-established.

I am thinking that this was highly likely to have been the source of my problem. A hard one to determine since there were no problems watching many on demand TV services. Only occasional overload of the router, perhaps frantically trying to make sense of this strange connection.

Fingers crossed as I continue to monitor the quality.

Thanks for your all of your input and interest.