I can understand the FTC being involved because trade. But the FCC? Maybe regulatory authority over WiFi? But this seems like massive over reach.
Remember when conservatives claimed to support smaller government?
this post was submitted on 24 Mar 2026
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I mean... "Small government" Republicans were always demonstrably lying, as far back as any of them have been alive. Every one of them just wanted to shift money from things that support people to the pockets of their donors.
I have done a couple similar setups. Fun facts: cell towers have asymmetrical signal and if you are too close, your signal is bad. Those are hard ones to explain to farmers that have towers installed on their properties.
Build your own open WRT router or get one of theirs. It's the best way to go and you don't get dragged through the monthly fee wringer for stupid child security or other stuff that is not well designed.
Use openwrt.
The excuse that it's for security reasons just immediately falls apart when you get to this part of the article:
The notice from the FCC states that companies can apply for conditional approval for new products from the Department of War or the Department of Homeland Security. However, that requires the businesses to provide a plan for shifting at least some of their manufacturing to the US in order to receive that conditional approval.
So it's fine to supposedly threaten national security if you do some more manufacturing in the US? Uh-huh. How does that balance out exactly?
I hate to say anything that would defend any of this, but cheap Chinese routers are very prone to security issues. There's a guy that has a youtube channel built arond taking apart and reverse engineering all kids of electroncis. He's found some pretty bad stuff in generic routers, static logins, telemetry sent home, remote executable code in the admin portal while not logged in.
I agree there's a lot more here they hope to gain, and that those gains are their primary objective, but there are some real issues from consumer network electronics.
That may be true and is certainly a well known concern …. Yet given the US government’s recent history, I have a hard time believing much of what they say
Cheap Chinese routers as a risk being true doesn’t prevent it from also being true that the current us administration is full of shit and likely more concerned about enriching someone connected to them, or tilt at windmills
There's better ways to do it then, EU don't have that problem for example, and we buy plenty from China.
We just have safety and security standards enshrined into law, and don't deal with anyone that doesn't agree to follow them.
It's why some products have the C€ symbol on them, which is "this has been imported, and meets all legal requirement", and all shops are not allowed to sell anything without that cert if imported.
(Though this don't apply to direct delivery from other nations, so it's not bulletproof)
That's kinda what's going on. They're pulling the FCC logo and making it illegal to resell without authorization. Hopefully, (but not assuredly) part of that authorization will be to make sure they comply with security.
Though I'm absolutely certain those 'agreements' cost a pretty penny and it's lining someone's pocket as well.
Ah but the C€ don't require you to manufacture some or all parts in the country though, or to pay a fee for the courtesy of dodging the law
pay a fee for the courtesy of dodging the law
Not that i'd be suprised for it to be so, but conditional approval doesn't automatically mean pay a fee and we don't check.
If I read this right it goes beyond the cheap no-name Chinese stuff that we hopefully all know to avoid by now. This would prevent US companies from outsourcing manufacture to foreign countries, which pretty much all companies do at this point
That would keep routers.ca from reselling Temu routers, net win.
I just hope that part of this doesn't include mandatory backdoors for US agencies. This might be the start of the great firewall of the US
it will
if that ends up being the case, us linux nuts can start making and selling our own routers!
Side Hustle!
In the Age of Technology and AI, it does make sense to have any manufacturing operations in house than overseas. Ofc if there were countries we could trust that would be onpar as well, but the U.S. pretty much shit the bed on alliances.
Sounds like it's just a modern version of Indulgences to me.
You have all sinned against ~~God~~ America, but if you pay the donation to the ~~church~~ government then you will be given access to ~~heaven~~ America
The only explanation that makes sense to me is that this is a law to:
- get bribes or favors from telecom equipment manufacturers.
- Create a framework to force backdoors into consumer equipment.
- Force users to use ISP provided equipment.
ISP provided equipment is also made outside of the US. This affects way more than just telecom stuff
but does ISP provided equipment count as consumer grade?
TPLink needed to get their shit in order for years. This has been cooking since 2019. However, this administration is just turned it into a bribery scheme.
Even more isolationism. Knowing how the usa works, they discovered the equipment was set up for spying on their people and they want all of that "spying on their own people" power for themselves.
Yup. That's basically what happened with TikTok.
they want all of that “spying on their own people” power for themselves.
My assumption as well, after after the video release in the Guthrie case, we know objectively that every device with a microphone or camera and a wireless connection is spying on us and feeding the data to the US government without a warrant too.
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Gold colored Trump Router incoming
A promise of it not the actual router.
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Does the US really make their own routers pretty much all electronics come from the China.
I suspect what's going to happen is that the components will come from China and then some white label manufacturer will just put them together in the US, therefore they were "made" in the US so are okay. But it'll be literally the same chips and circuit board and firmware as before.
Won't even assemble them... they'll just buy, slap a made in USA and branding sticker, rebox, and sell at a 150% markup
TrumpiFi Gold incoming in 3... 2... 1...
It'll feature the B, G, N, E, P S T E and I bandwidths.
You can always get your own non-router hardware of significantly higher quality and run PFSense or similar for an end result that blows any consumer grade router out of the water. Unless they start banning all PCs this is the better way to go anyway.
Yes. I run OPNsense and it's very good, and all you need is a machine with two or more Ethernet ports. But this option is becoming more expensive with the crazy prices of RAM and storage.
You can run pfsense on a gig of memory if you arent using Snort or pfblocker. I had this on a vps for an email gateway, worked fine. Adding block lists or services gooses memory usage though
Thus assuring the American public of using shitty American made junk filled with who knows what spyware, and paying two or three times what the piece of junk is worth.
So... who's getting the kickbacks out of this deal? Let me guess... does it wear a lot of orange makeup?
This only applies to routers.
It's not widely known outside the ham radio community, but part of the 2.4GHz wifi band overlaps the 13cm amateur radio band. If you turn off 5GHz wifi and lock the 2.4GHz AP to Channel 1, it qualifies as a ham radio, and can be sold as a ham radio instead of an AP/Router. You do need a ham radio license to operate it as a Ham AP, but you do not need a license to buy a Ham AP.
If the end user wants to turn on 5GHz after the fact, there is not a damn thing the FCC can do about it.
That deals with the need for a WiFi access point, but not the main router functionality. Another approach would be a low-power PC running OPNsense or PFsense with a WiFi card repurposed as an access point.
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So this may be a good place to ask. With this news in mind does anyone have a good guide to follow to build your own router. I’ve read a little that a mini pc with more than one Ethernet port is the only requirement but I haven’t found any good guides yet, only articles on why you should.
If you search for "install OPNsense" or "install PFsense" you'll find quite a few guides. It's not difficult to get going with these, but you should expect a bit of a learning curve if you're coming from preconfigured home routers. It's worth it though: these are far more powerful systems than regular home router software and give you much more control and advanced features like VLANs and intrusion detection.
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