I would be more impressed if they would ban all enterprise routers manufactured in China. I have had to continuously patch and meticulously mitigate severe vulnerabilities and bugs in Cisco, Dell, HPE, Extreme, Arista routers, switches, fabrics, and others. These are all manufactured in China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Vietnam, Malaysia, Thailand, and probably elsewhere in the Greater China region... Actually I take it all back. I wish they would just ban companies from shipping bad code and sanction them for causing millions of hours of required labor to ensure their manufacturing defects do not harm businesses and their customers. Thank you for your attention to my chatter.

Jeff Geerling's reaction: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=04oL0qVSWJE

As someone who works with networking (consumer prosumer enterprise everything) the problem is far more complex than : make it open.

Manufacturers can support devices for long but it costs money which the consumers / businesses aren’t willing to pay or value. Cybersecurity is a joke and the general consensus is : we will pay for things as and when there is a fire. We don’t put a price on prevention because we can’t really show it to shareholders how we profited from not being attacked since we blocked those. So we create an arbitrary certification and pass things according to it. This certification doesn’t say anything about firmware. But if we do get attacked then we can convince the shareholders to spend money on better equipment this financial year and then not bother until the next time we have a problem.

Some of these certifications focus on what the devices allow you to do (like acls and firewalls) and see if they pass these tests. But actually looking at the firmware and finding vulnerabilities is not in scope.

Yeah, it does sound like this should be focused on verifying firmware, including all future updates. If a Chinese company builds the router at a US Foxconn site, it is still the same situation.

If worried about supply chain and inside jobs, I worry more about the IoT widgets I have. They are already inside the LAN, can access the internet, etc.

Anyway, bribes aside, this is probably just a talking point and not much actually changes.

I am having trouble understaning. First, which routers are actually made in the USA? ASAIK, none of them are.

I have a small stockpile of wifi 6 routers running openwrt. I'm set for quite a while given that wifi 6 is plenty fast enough for my family.

This is kind of a boneheaded way of handling whatever issues they're claiming.

Wouldn’t you purchase an American made router if you could?

I switched away from Omada to Ubiquiti, because of TP Link’s problems.

This would be so much less of a pain if decent wifi pcie cards were available.

It's all a bunch of very expensive kind of dodgy Compex cards, used for industrial or prototype purposes. Be prepared to spend $300+ for a single 4x4 MIMO card. And then you want to go dual band right?

Thankfully the MediaTek offerings are somewhat available and much much much cheaper, but reports are that driver quality is just absymal.

Meanwhile the openwrt table of hardware for wifi 6 and wifi 7 is a bare trickle already, and inceasingly not consumer routers but SBC. Thanks for the FCC messing things up brutally already, back in 2015, with requirements to make sure users couldn't possibly do anything out of spec, requiring these systems to be locked down. They almost banned open source outright, but in practice it feels like the requirements are high enough that they practically did. https://toh.openwrt.org/?features=wifi_be https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/03/tp-li...

Frelling FCC! What dastardly deeds done against civilization! We would be so much more secure & protected, the bar would be so much higher if open source / openwrt was allowed to compete. You messed everything up already!!

This is just the trump administration blocking companies unless they pay the danegeld.

Thats what this is all about: government level blackmail.

So... What are the options now for American consumers? What brands are left and available?