> all consumer-grade routers produced in foreign countries
Are there even consumer-grade routers that are produced in the USA...?
But we can still buy old models:
> As outlined below, today’s action does not impact a consumer’s continued use of routers they previously acquired. Nor does it prevent retailers from continuing to sell, import, or market router models approved previously through the FCC’s equipment authorization process. By operation of the FCC’s Covered List rules, the restrictions imposed today apply to new device models.
I’m sure plenty of US factories are capable of importing boxes that look like routers but are actually just switches (because the router firmware is missing) and re-flashing them here…
Right? Even enterprise routers, e.g. Cisco, are not produced in USA.
You can theoretically use any computer as a router. I've used a Raspberry Pi as a router through a single NIC with VLANs.
> consumer-grade routers that are produced in the USA
Starlink?
Qualcomm is a US company right? I've worked on a few WiFi router devices and their chips are pretty popular in that segment. But WiFi is not a priority for Qualcomm (in fact they actively sabotage it for their more profitable 5G segment), and software is even less of a priority. So you had "parsing 802.11 TLVs in the kernel with obvious stack overflows" quality code drops.
(Which is why it's a bit ironic I saw the Google Fiber guy post on X about how they always had TPM^TM "security" in their routers; thats cool, but the drivers you used still made them "general purpose computing over the air" devices)
Are there any consumer-grade routers that aren't produced in Taiwan?
Guys from heise.de [1] haven't found any.
[1] https://www.heise.de/en/news/USA-bans-all-new-routers-for-co...