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- cross-posted to:
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The United States’ foreign router ban didn’t make a whole lot of sense, and today may not change that.
The FCC has just granted Netgear a conditional approval to import its future consumer routers, cable modems, and cable gateways into the US through October 1st, 2027 — even though the company builds those devices in Asia and has not announced any plan to bring manufacturing to the United States.
Neither the FCC’s announcement nor Netgear’s announcement explain why Netgear was granted the temporary exemption. The FCC only states that the Pentagon has now made “a specific determination” that “such devices do not pose risks to U.S. national security.”
The first part isn’t that unusual, and then it leads to the second part being provisioning the CPE (weird to not do it remote, but they probably get some kickbacks from the HOA). And then the last part sounds like user-error/bad business practices (because how’s an ISP supposed to limit the number of devices when everything goes through my own router?)
But I agree, that’s not very nice and I wouldn’t want to live there either.