Why the FCC’s router crackdown could leave you stuck with older Wi-Fi

If you own a home Wi-Fi router (and who doesn’t?) you might be in a pinch: you own an aging, insecure gateway, but the government isn’t going to allow you to easily upgrade it.

The FCC’s March decision to block Wi-Fi consumer routers made or designed on foreign soil immediately crippled the market: virtually all routers are made or designed overseas, either by foreign companies or contract manufacturers.

The FCC’s actions are already in place. They don’t block the actual transactional sale of a new router, but they block the licensing and approval of new routers to be sold in the United States — an indirect ban, but an effective one. The FCC’s regulation also guarantees that you’ll be upgrade the firmware of your router through March 2027. After that, it’s up in the air. It’s an effective cap on new routers being developed, approved, and sold, but also might affect the supply of existing, approved routers, too.

A recent study by Ookla, the manufacturer of Speedtest, offers some additional perspective: The study says that the top Speedtest users (used by Ookla as a “market share” proxy for the United States) not only use routers made outside the U.S., but that those routers are due for an upgrade.

The study also indirectly addresses another issue: most of the listed brands aren’t well-known retail names, implying that they are actually “white label” hardware. In fact, several of the names on the list are used by major ISPs like Comcast and Charter. Under the new rules, your ISP wouldn’t be allowed to offer you an upgrade…or even possibly a firmware upgrade, either.

Ookla

It’s a big problem, since just over a third (35 percent) of all tested routers ran either 2009’s Wi-Fi 4 (802.11n) or 2013’s Wi-Fi 5 (802.11ac) standards, which have long been superseded by 2023’s Wi-Fi 7 and the upcoming Wi-Fi 8. Most of the flagship features on each wireless standard deal with improved throughput and connectivity, but they also include under-the-hood protections which help secure your data. Upgrading your router certainly helps solve that problem, as well as ensuring your firmware is up to date too.

The top brand used by Speedtest users is Amazon’s Eero, which doesn’t disclose where the router is manufactured. But as Ookla notes: ““It is not possible to build a consumer router based entirely on U.S. components; that part of the supply chain doesn’t exist in the United States,” added analyst Avi Greengart of Techsponential.

Other brands, such as Asustek and Arcadyan, are headquartered in Taiwan. That would almost immediately disqualify them from future sale.

The vast majority of Eero routers use either Wi-Fi 7 or Wi-Fi 6, the most modern standard. The manufacturer with the oldest hardware listed is Google, with about 66 percent of its users stuck on Wi-5 or Wi-Fi 4.

Ookla’s vendor list also includes several white-box brands: Arcadyan, the top vendor of hardware to Verizon customers; Arris, the top vendor of Comcast-branded routers; and Askey and Sagemcom, which supply router hardware to Charter.

The trouble isn’t owning one of these routers; the trouble is in replacing them. Analysts have told me that the only routers that they’re aware of that are (probably) all domestically designed and built are the Starlink routers. (The company didn’t respond to a request for comment.) However, this solution won’t work for everyone.

Instead, the industry (and government!) are going to have to come up with come middle ground. Otherwise, the only strategy possible is to buy up all the available supply of modern routers — and when those are gone, they’re gone.