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.
Same for me. I’ve used pfSense for 10+ years, and I have a couple of TP-Link access points running OpenWRT.
The reflashing instruction for my model is a bit amusing: https://openwrt.org/toh/tp-link/eap245_v1#recipe
a_very_dumb_nickname,
I still remember the days is was only “upload this firmware using the stock upgrade tool”. No hoops or exploits were necessary.
Though, I think for many people today, a dual ethernet mini PC + opnSense would be a great alternative.
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?
Netgear is who pushed this most.
Let them ban exporting their routers as well… just to make it fair.
I feel this move is less about security and more about control. If the only routers allowed in the US are made by American companies, and American companies can be pressured by the US government to include backdoors or even just remote-controlled kill switches, then every household and business in the US will be vulnerable to government control and censorship. If the government doesn’t care for the speech of a certain person, that person’s ability to spread their speech via their home computer is now taken away.
And the victim won’t even know why or how it happened; they might argue with their ISP and their router manufacturer, they might buy a new router and change ISPs, but it will happen again.