If Fritz Boxes would actually be a good product...frequent internet drops, which a simple restart fixes, is that normal for routers from other brands? As a German, I don't know, because I've been forced to use these shitty Fritz Boxes my entire life.
As a German who lived a prolonged time abroad, I might have a perspective. I wasn't actually aware that I would be forced to use Fritz products here, but they certainly seem omnipresent. My 7530AX performs actually flawless, no complaints there. I wished it would offer more functionality, e.g. NFS, ability to force some clients to use either 2.4 or 5GHz (to circumvent a current bug in the Nokia G20) or make it easier to upload Linux on them, but I wouldn't call it a bad product. I'd rather give it 4 out of 5 stars. I liked my Linksys WRT54GL, but that was very dated (too slow to exploit the 50Mbps connection to the Internet and no 5GHz) when I finally left it behind during the last move. The Dlink product (713p?) I used (much) earlier was poor, with buggy firmware not supported or maintained by the manufacturer after sale.
Dropping Internet connections which are fixed by a restart sounds to me like a marginal connection (the restart forces a re-learn of DSL parameters). The Fritz box should be able to diagnose that.
Working absolutely flawless here, months of uptime.
And no, you're not forced to use them, "Routerzwang" hasn't been a thing in almost a decade, ISPs are required to allow you to use any router you like.
Technically you are no longer forced to use them but the IPSs will try to make your life as difficult as they can if you want to use your own router while often discounting the rent for their AVM routers to $0 (meaning it everyone pais for them with their base subscriber fee even if you opt out of getting one).
Not my experience. With o2, the sales guy on the phone even recommended buying a fritz box when I told him I don't want to rent their "o2 homebox" (which is not made by avm and has a terrible reputation) for 2€ a month.
With Kabel Deutschland the process was also painless. I disconnected their box which they lend to you for free (also not avm), connected the fritzbox I bought on ebay and ended up on some form of captive portal where I had to enter my customer information and boom I was online. I've yet to encounter an isp which tries to force you to use a fritzbox. But then again I wouldn't mind since they are reliable and stable. :)
In the Netherlands the Fritz boxes are seen as one of the 'premium' brands. Most other ISP provided routers are completely shit random value brands so that might explain the difference.
I'm on my third Fritzbox now and only the second one really went bad after 8 years (dropped the VDSL connection multiple times per day) so was promptly replace by the ISP. Current one is a 7583 that's been running really stable for a few years now.
Of course it's a network product: it might also be a spotty hardware part on the other side of your connection. I'd suggest calling your ISP...
I don't know what you are talking about. Every time I got an ISP contract and used their default router I got nothing but problems until I decided to upgrade to their Fritz Box offering and then all the problems disappear. LAN and WiFi just work.
I used to have connection issues every few weeks. I got a digital timer plug and reboot my router every night at 3am, that fixed almost all of my connection drops. I was thinking about this XKCD comic after digging through logs to try and trouble shoot the issue https://xkcd.com/1495/ and just went with the timer solution.
