FRITZ! just showed up to IFA Berlin looking like it means business

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This article is written in paid partnership with FRITZ! All opinions and framing are my own.

Let me be honest with you for a second.

Home networking gear is not, historically, the kind of thing that gets me out of bed in the morning. It lives in a cupboard, blinks at you occasionally, and you only think about it when something stops working. The router is the unsung hero of your entire digital life – and most manufacturers treat it like one, designing boxes that look like they were drawn by someone who’d given up.

So when FRITZ! got in touch ahead of IFA Berlin 2026, I was curious but measured. Then I saw what they were actually bringing to the show.

Right. Let me walk you through it.

The new flagship: FRITZ!Box DSL/Fiber 7-90

This is the one that caught my eye first. FRITZ!’s new flagship model, the FRITZ!Box DSL/Fiber 7-90, is making its IFA premiere in Berlin – and the first thing worth saying is that it looks completely different to what’s come before.

FRITZ! describe it in their official press release as “sleek, elegant and robust” – and for once, that’s not just marketing copy. The 7-90 has a genuinely new design; the kind of thing that makes you realise just how little effort most networking companies put into the hardware you’re staring at every day. It’s the sort of box you could leave on a shelf rather than hiding behind the sofa.

I haven’t had hands-on time with the 7-90 yet – the team at FRITZ! showcased it live at IFA – but on paper (and from the press materials) this feels like a meaningful step up. A flagship is only a flagship if it earns the title, and the design alone suggests someone at FRITZ! actually thought hard about what sits in people’s homes.

What I’d want to know when I get proper time with it: does the internal performance match the external ambition? Because a pretty router that drops packets is just a pretty problem. That’s the thing I’ll be watching.

If you’re in the market for a new laptop to pair with a upgraded home network, we’ve got you covered. Check out our MacBook Air vs Pro guide for more.

The repeater that makes everything else look slow

If the 7-90 is the headliner, the FRITZ!Repeater 6700 Pro is the support act that nearly steals the show.

This is a quad-band Wi-Fi 7 repeater with speeds of up to 18Gbit/s. Eighteen. Gigabits. Per second. I’ve never been able to throw that kind of number at a repeater before – because until now, nothing in the home networking space has come close to offering it. For context: most people’s internet connections top out at a fraction of that. What 18Gbit/s means in practice is that the bottleneck in your home network almost certainly won’t be the repeater. It’s pushing so far beyond what most of us currently need that it’s essentially future-proofed by design.

Wi-Fi 7 itself is the important underlying story here. The jump from Wi-Fi 6E to 7 brings lower latency, better handling of congested environments (hello, everyone in my street who’s apparently on the same channel as me), and the ability to use multiple links simultaneously. A quad-band Wi-Fi 7 repeater, done properly, should mean the signal in the far corner of your house – the one that’s been dropping out during calls for three years – actually works reliably.

I challenge you to find a repeater spec sheet that goes toe-to-toe with this one (you won’t, easily).

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5G and cable: covering the bases

FRITZ! aren’t stopping at DSL and fibre. At IFA they’re also showing new FRITZ!Box models for 5G and cable connections – which matters more than it might sound.

The home broadband landscape in 2026 is genuinely fragmented. Some of us are on full-fibre. Some are still on cable. A growing number are using 5G home broadband because it’s the fastest thing available where they live, or because they’ve given up waiting for a decent fixed-line install. A product family that only plays nicely with one connection type is leaving a huge chunk of people behind.

FRITZ! showing up at IFA with solutions across DSL, fibre, 5G and cable suggests they’re thinking about the whole picture rather than just the premium end. That’s worth noting.

FRITZ!OS 8.50

Every piece of hardware FRITZ! makes runs on FRITZ!OS, and the new 8.50 version is being introduced alongside all of the above.

Software is where home networking brands quietly win or lose. The hardware specs can be spectacular, but if the interface is a nightmare, or the parental controls are buried under seventeen menus, or you can’t set up a guest network without a degree in computer science – it all falls apart. FRITZ!OS has generally had a solid reputation for being more accessible than most, and 8.50 will be the version tying all these new products together.

Full details of what 8.50 brings are coming out of IFA – I’ll be keeping an eye on what’s new in the software side, because that’s often where the day-to-day experience actually lives.

Software experience matters just as much in phones as it does in routers. See how it plays out in our Nothing Phone (4a) review for more.

Why any of this matters to you

Look, I know the router conversation isn’t the most glamorous one I have on this channel. But here’s the thing: everything else you buy – the laptop, the phone, the 4K telly, the smart home gadgets, the NAS drive you definitely didn’t need but absolutely love – all of it runs through your home network. All of it.

A weak link in that chain costs you in ways that are easy to miss: the video call that pixelates at the worst moment, the game that lags when it shouldn’t, the smart home device that just stops responding for no obvious reason. Most of the time, the culprit is the network. And most of the time, the network is the thing nobody upgraded.

FRITZ! bringing a proper flagship design, a bonkers-fast quad-band Wi-Fi 7 repeater, and coverage across every major connection type to IFA Berlin is the kind of move that suggests they’re taking that seriously. Whether the 7-90 delivers on the promise of its looks, and whether 8.50 brings meaningful software improvements – those are questions I’ll be digging into when I can get proper hands-on time.

For now, if you’re curious about the full details on the FRITZ!Box DSL/Fiber 7-90 and everything else FRITZ! are showcasing at IFA, their official press release has everything – worth a read if your home network is on the list of things you’ve been meaning to sort out.

And if it is on that list: maybe now’s the time.