The US Federal Communications Commission has added every consumer-grade Wi-Fi router made outside the country to its Covered List, slamming the door on new imports and sales.
The FCC says the list covers kit the US government reckons poses an “unacceptable risk” to national security, which conveniently blocks it from getting the equipment authorisation needed to be sold.
That means routers manufactured outside the US cannot be imported or sold, which is basically the entire consumer market.
TP-Link, ASUS, and the US company Netgear get dragged into it, since plenty of their boxes are made abroad, and anything designed in the US and built elsewhere, or the other way round.
The four-page National Security Determination cited by the FCC said: “Recently, malicious state and non-state sponsored cyber attackers have increasingly leveraged the vulnerabilities in small and home office routers produced abroad to carry out direct attacks against American civilians in their homes.”
It pointed at the 2024 Salt Typhoon hack and claimed routers were “directly implicated” in the attack.
“From disrupting network connectivity to enabling local networking espionage and intellectual property theft, foreign-produced routers present unacceptable risks to Americans.”
Even so, when most routers roll off the line outside the US, it is hard to ignore the whiff of correlation being promoted as causation.
The FCC is not yanking authorisation for routers already approved, so nobody needs to bin the box under the telly today.
The real pain lands later, because no new routers can get approved, so replacement options will dry up while your home network is still expected to cope with faster broadband and more devices.
