YouGov Survey Claims to Find High Level of Trust in European Routers
A new YouGov survey of 5,209 participants from the UK, Austria, Switzerland, the Netherlands, and Italy, which was conducted during August 2025 and commissioned by FRITZ! (somewhat of a vested interest), claims to have found that users regard European brands of broadband router as the “most trustworthy“.
According to the results, only 10% of respondents said they distrust European router manufacturers, which compares well with 48% for Chinese and 55% for Russian brands. Almost all participants also named reliability, speed and security as the most important purchase criteria.
However, this is hardly a surprising outcome and if Chinese respondents were, for example, asked the same question, then they’d probably trust their own brands more. Curiously, there’s no mention in the press release of the USA (Cisco, Netgear, eero etc.) or Taiwan (e.g. ASUS, D-Link etc.), which are home to many key router brands.
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In addition to features such as Wi-Fi coverage and speed, consumers in the UK and Europe also placed great importance on aspects like security (e.g. a powerful firewall or encryption), reliability, or price, performance, and service. Over 90% of all participants rated these aspects as important or very important.
The above is relevant as the EU is currently meeting in Berlin to find ways for how Europe can become less reliant on tech giants from the US and China.
Jan Oetjen, CEO of FRITZ!, said:
“The security of routers is directly linked to digital sovereignty in Europe. An increasing amount of sensitive data – from online banking to tax returns – is transmitted via our home network. Compromised routers therefore pose an immense threat, as they can be misused as weapons for cyberattacks and malicious traffic is hardly distinguishable from legitimate traffic. Similar to the decisions made in the 5G sector, we must ensure that our routers are secure and remain in European hands to protect our digital freedom.”
Naturally, no survey commissioned by a party with a vested interest in the outcome would be complete without a bit of self-promotion. Across all countries surveyed, FRITZ!Box routers are separately claimed to have achieved the highest Net Promoter Score (i.e. a gauge of how likely participants are to recommend their router). But no comparative details were provided for rival brands.
Mark is a professional technology writer, IT consultant and computer engineer from Dorset (England), he also founded ISPreview in 1999 and enjoys analysing the latest telecoms and broadband developments. Find me on X (Twitter), Mastodon, Facebook, BlueSky, Threads.net and Linkedin.
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I would absolutely never use an ISPs router. For one thing you have no idea what access they or anyone else have to it and more importantly many ISPs can’t be bothered to patch vulnerabilities or problems. I always go with a 3rd party router or a software router. I suppose most people couldn’t care less, but some of us do care about security. I’m personally not a fan of the Frtiz! but I know some places like for example AAISP absolutely love them. I find them overpriced and lacking important features personally
This is quite a simplistic argument. In reality, third party routers have issues of their own (security or otherwise) and it is not necessarily the case that they are better than ISP supplied equipment. It is also the case that some ISPs – though not necessarily all – take more of an interest in what goes into their products than you might imagine.
ISPs have responsibilities under the PSTI including a commitment to updates and security patches. This is why you’ve seen ISPs plead for their customers to accept a free upgrade as they no longer wish to support the hardware that they have.
I always smile when someone complains about their “software or 3rd party router” struggling to get the speeds they pay for due to performance issues with said router, meanwhile a $50 box with a comparatively sluggish ARM chip and hardware acceleration is running rings around it.
why do they let this troll Ivor respond to people? obvious troll tactic, same every time he replies to anyone.
1) belittle the argument
2) claim it’s wrong and that the opposite is true
3) spout some hogwash about opensource being bad
disregarded literally his entire post now.
Good for you, but tell me how people are expected to use digital voice on BT for example, without their ISP router?
anon – if you’re going to comment, expect people to challenge what you say. If I have said something that is inaccurate, challenge it. It has to be a bit more evidential than “I hate opensource” (which I did not say or even imply).
This website’s own forum has examples of people who have bought into this commonly held idea that all ISP routers are universally bad, paid a considerable sum of money to replace it, and have found that it offers worse performance (eg, because they have a multi-gig line and their new router / PC acting as a router has inefficient software processing that can’t handle it).
This then leads to further falsehoods like complaints to ISPs that continue to use PPPoE, claiming that this is an inefficient protocol, when that is not the case when using high quality equipment.
It’s not like I don’t speak from experience. I have bought these devices (I have some Ubiquiti slop on a shelf nearby) and I have used them. They are at best overrated and simply unnecessary for 99.9% of users. Which is probably why most customers do still use whatever they’re sent.
For a change, I agree with Ivor, well kind off, nto sure what he means with this.
someone complains about their “software or 3rd party router” struggling to get the speeds they pay for due to performance issues with said router, meanwhile a $50 box with a comparatively sluggish ARM chip and hardware acceleration is running rings around it.
Is he on about, $50 IPS router or any router that cost $50? By the way, we are in the U.K., so use £.
I use a TP-link router that cost me £80 or something like that over 2years ago and it works fine.
Saying about Arm based routers, a mate had a muck around with a Radxa ITX board and made a router with it, and it worked so well it has now replaced his normal router.
As for ISP supplied routers, I used them now and again, I think now, I would choose to use my own.
I have a giggle when some people say about going with Ubiquiti or something like that, as Ivor posted, for the majority of people it is a overkill unless you are into mucking around with that of thing.
Except Fritz and Mikrotik, what other brands are European? I am asking for end user products not enterprise like Ericsson, Nokia etc.
Teltonika (see my comment below).
Stick to Openwrt enabled routers.
For the majority of people, it is an overkill, most people just want a router that will connect them to the net.
I was going to make my own router once, but i don’t think it is worth it.
I have made a mini Nas.
Yet they are all made, loaded with software and branded as required in China. I think it tells you that some people don’t understand that the brand name is meaningless on these consumer devices.
Pretty sure AVM makes their Fritz!boxes in Europe? Although of course it depends on how you define “make” — while they’re assembled in Europe I’ve no doubt that some of the parts come from China.
China is falling out of favour. Just as Apple has been shifting manufacturing out of China, so have others. The ISP supplied routers I have here are not made in China, and the companies that made them (as shown by the MAC address prefix) are not Chinese.
At the risk of being branded a belitting troll, I’ll say that it’s not (and never has been) the case that it’s 100% Chinese. The big OEMs (who make kit for both ISPs and companies like Asus) tend to be Taiwanese or European. The important chips are likely to be Western (Broadcom, Qualcomm, etc) or from countries that are closely aligned to us (Samsung, Realtek, Mediatek).
In recent years it’s only become less and less Chinese with the US pressuring its allies to cut them out of supply chains. There are also UK and European efforts with our Product Safety and Telecommunications Act and its EU counterpart.
Brand name have been meaningless on a lot of things over the years, look at TV sets, you would think Panasonic would be great and yet, their cheaper models are produced in Turkey by Vestel. It is difficult to know who makes what theses days and also that is the same with food.
As for routers a fair few seems to have dropped out of the home market over the years, I had a Netgear ADSL router years ago, great router, while they are still around and still produce home routers, they seem to have fallen out of favour, and they are pretty expensive.
Most things come from China these days, my router, my Tv, my phone and most of my smart home stuff is Chinese owned and produced. What do you do?
@Ivor, I thought the Mac address was registered to a vendor, not a country?
I use a Teltonika router, designed and made in Lithuania and using customised OpenWRT Linux-based firmware (RutOS). They are primarily aimed at industrial users, so they are rugged and solidly built, with nice aluminium cases. They don’t have all the gimmicky consumer features like “gaming acceleration” and snazzy 3D user interfaces, but they do have solid, powerful, high security features for networking geeks. There are lots of models, with or without Wi-Fi and cellular (i.e. 4G/5G backup capability). We used to use them at work (for actual industrial sites) so I decided to get one for home too!
Similarily Nethsecurity is also OpenWRT based, which is what I have switched to. (runs on X86/X86_64 only for now).
don’t get me wrong PfSense/OPNsense are very very good and very highly regarded but sometimes you really don’t need that deep level of features.
In terms of routers, I literally only will buy and trust those from Xiaomi, GL.iNet and Asus – Two Chinese and a Taiwan. For this poll, were people asked do you trust GL.iNet and Asus routers, or were they asked, do you trust Chinese brands? You’d get two different results asking those two different questions
That’s pretty surreal. You trust three random brands on the basis of what? Not even specific router model, just the brand.
Russian brands are available in Europe? Really? I find that hard to believe.
I suspect most people use whatever their ISP provides and have no idea what brand it is or where it was made. Sounds like another survey where the answer was decided first.
YouGov surveys not worth the time they took to create, horrendous accuracy across the board.
I earn £50 every couple of months from them just by flying through them while watching TV in an evening so I don’t mind. 😉
ISP love supplying their own routers as they usually hage some form of access and can push firmware and settings changes. On the one hand it’s great for tech support agents when it comes to dealing with some customers but I have seen buggy updates pushed out to thousands, especially with AVM and this then creates a headache for the tech support staff on the front line who aren’t always told about the changes that were pushed at the time.