WiFi dropout on FritzBox 7530

Quite recently - not sure when it started, maybe a month ago - we've been having wifi dropouts from our FritzBox 7530, supplied by Zen. They don't last long - a few seconds to judge from what happens on a long ping test - but long enough to disconnect network shares from PCs to our Synology NAS, and to cause phones to switch over to 4G (and stay there when it comes back). They are happening several times an hour, so this is intolerable. We're currently on FritzOS 8.02, but I can't find out when that was pushed out. We're on a Zen FTTP package, which we've had for a couple of years without problems; the FritzBox was supplied at that time. I'm interested to know whether others are getting this issue; also suggestions of how to diagnose it further and/or fix it. I've worked through the suggestions on the Zen support site without success, except that I haven't gone looking for interference, because I can't think of any new electrical kit that's arrived in the house in the right timeframe.

Are these dropouts regular or random?

No similar drop-outs. Applies to 7530 on 8.02 and new 7530ax on 8.20. You could try downloading a wifi-analyser app for your phone and looking at the signal strength and local competition.

I haven't detected any regularity. I'm thinking of running an hours'-long ping test so I can look at the output and see if there's any pattern. I have tried restarting the FritzBox, but I don't yet know whether that has helped - a 1000-ping run (just pinging the Fritz from a laptop on WiFi) showed only a 1% dropped packet rate, whereas it was at 5% last night with some pings reporting "unknown error" (or something like that) rather than just no response; at least one of those events was associated with a dropout that unmapped the file shares on the NAS. I'll know more when I'm back home this evening.

Might be worth asking Zen to replace the 7530 with the later 7530AX. They did this automatically when I upgraded from VDSL to Fibre 900, 2 or 3 years ago.

Further thoughts. Are you able to set up a BQM from this site? If you are running IPv6, you could try 1 for the router and a 2nd for a workstation. Also a rather random thought, do you have any duplicate IP addresses? Can happen if you have 2 DHCP servers or a mix of fixed and DHCP allocations with the DHCP pool overlapping fixed addresses.

Thanks @partij32, that's helpful to know - reinforces my thought that my Fritzbox may have gone tech. Do you happen to know when your 7530 got 8.02?

Edited by seglea (Tue 07-Oct-25 15:53:08)

Thanks for all these suggestions @DFScale. Can you tell me what a BQM is, please? Sorry to be ignorant.
I don't have IPv6 enabled at present but could try it.
I'm pretty sure there's no overlapping of IPs - I do have a block of fixed ones (file server, printer, and a few spare) but I think I've set the boundaries correctly - however that gives me something to check.

Thanks @cjn - I'm definitely going down the road of asking Zen for a replacement once I've excluded software update and environmental noise (must find an AM radio).

BQM = broadband quality monitor https://www.thinkbroadband.com/broadband/monitoring/...

If you don't already have IPv6 enabled, I suggest you leave well alone until you have cleared up the present problem, rather than add more unknown factors