The U.S. Federal Communications Commission said on Monday it was banning the import of all new foreign-made consumer routers, the latest crackdown on Chinese-made electronic gear over security concerns.
China is estimated to control at least 60% of the U.S. market for home routers, boxes that connect computers, phones, and smart devices to the internet.
↫ David Shepardson at Reuters
I’m sure the American public will be thrilled to find out yet another necessity has drastically increased in price.
As long as the firmware can be open source, it should be okay. That is my opinion.
I think this rule is specifically for TP-Link. I used to use their brand almost exclusively (with OpenWRT), but they locked it down ~10 years ago, and I never went back.
We have a custom router. with pfSense + one Unifi for their WiFI AP is pretty reasonably priced. Unifi is not entirely open source, but at least good enough Linux (they have production here in the USA, but only first batches for new products, then they relegate to cheaper countries)
The world should be better if people start using proper routers. But I’m not sure a government mandate is the way to do this.
I get it. Huawei was growing into a rival for Apple, so the US government shot it in the knee.
Who was TP-Link a threat to now?