Here was a news piece March 23.
https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/boards-policy-regulation/fcc-banning-imports-new-chinese-made-routers-citing-security-concerns-2026-03-23/
A router is no modem, though.
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Like the one Chinese phone manufacturer. No proof they did anything wrong whatsoever. It was just Trump doing both Apple’s and Samsung’s biding cause they were scared of more competition in the U.S. market.
I’m American and I’d bet they’re right that it was not reported on our news.
Since you didn’t name anyone bu name no it’s not political no matter who says otherwise. Now that said Trump and company know that this will cause a crisis and raise prices. one of the main points of this term for him is to get prices / profits up at any cost.
Another reason not to go to the 2026 
World Cup 
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For me there are countless reasons not to go there. 
Additionally there are a growing count of reasons even not to watch any game on TV. 
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The Protectli hardware can optionally include some modem hardware in some models (4G/5G for example).
But yeah, depending on how you connect to the internet, a separate modem would probably still be necessary.
Aaaand… would this also be made in the land of the free?
This is just hillarious 
I guess it depends on how things work where you are.
Here, a basic fibre-optic modem is provided by the government as a part of the national broadband network roll-out.
We have no such nationwide rollout, things are rolled out by (usually) megacorps and only to where it makes profitability figures 
I am living in a city mainly because of the digital ghetto which is the country side.
We may have to use the dusted PCs to build our own routers in the future. It should be much faster than those that we can buy from the market though.
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Last I heard, Taiwan and China were two different countries. Given their history I can’t see them collaborating on any kind of surveillance efforts.
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I 
the countryside. In the US there is little industry (jobs) in the countryside…
Oh yeah we’re talking about routers…I won’t sell the FCC short. It could be an over-reaction, but from the CNET article it’s clear that
- they know something we don’t know
or
- trying to stay ahead of things
“The FCC says that routers produced abroad were “directly implicated” in the Volt, Flax and Salt Typhoon cyberattacks. The Salt Typhoon attack specifically exploited Cisco routers to gain access to the networks of US internet providers like AT&T, Verizon and Lumen, which owns CenturyLink and Quantum Fiber.”
@Pudge interesting article all the same
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Politically complicated but yes, it is pretty uncommon that they would collaborate for such efforts.
From that reuters news piece, it isn’t necessarily surveillance / backdoors that may eventually run on these devices which is seen as the actual security risk.
It said malicious actors had exploited security gaps in foreign-made routers “to attack households, disrupt networks, enable espionage, and facilitate intellectual property theft,”
In other words, routers that are shipped with the factory passwords, which the owner didn’t changed… are essentially a preferred attack target to deploy a botnet instance. And the owner may not even be aware of, as the device functions as normal.
If it does make sense to only allow domestic routers? It may eventually not result in proper solution to eliminate that attack vector, if the consumer isn’t aware how to properly secure his own devices. Sure, but that SSID which is printed on the backside of a device isn’t actually an secure one, it’s just the factory preset. And there will be plenty of devices that still are using the factory passwords
Anyway, I guess that the import of bare PCBs / components in bulk may happen, eventually even with the firmware installed on the device. And in another shipping container the injection molded enclosures will also make their way into the country. Final assembly would make it a domestic product.
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The vector of attack is often way more interesting than breaching the corporate/government front door. Some of the biggest cyber hacks exploited an employee’s confidence that their own home network was safe. That employee unwittingly held sensitive data or access keys on devices in their home network which were breached, and ultimately allowed the hacker to breach the corporate/government resources from employee systems.
(check out Jack Rhysider’s Darknet Diaries podcast for many examples)
I’d suggest that the random SSID’s I’ve seen shipped with ISP supplied routers, is actually a good thing. It’s a considerably better option than a default, “Home wifi” or something like that.
The SSID is the salt for encryption, and if the SSID is unique, like “Lunksys-AP-T2R44903B”, that does a lot to reduce one vector of attack (rainbow tables).
But yeah, if you’re talking about predictable SSID’s and common factory passwords, that’s a problem for sure.
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Well not exactly.
Citizens of both see themselves as Chinese. Though due to the aggressive actions of Beijing towards Taipei there is a growing tendency to emphasis the Taiwanese identity. How long this will persist and whether it will be permanent is not clear
Both of them see themselves as the rightful ruler/rulers of China. While the other is seen as an usurper.
Both of them have the same map as what they see as their territories and their boundaries. The 11-dashed line, it is practically the same as the 9-dashed line. The Senkaku islands of Japan are seen by both Taipei and Beijing as Chinese islands and not Japanese. Ditto for Tibet and Xinjiang.
Basically Taiwan-China is the unfinished business of the Chinese civil war, which started once Dr. Sun Yat Sen passed away in the early 20th century. The Japanese invasion in 1930s and 1940s was merely a interregnum in this. Chiang Kai-Shek had some [memorably quote] regarding this.
But coming back to the main topic. Taiwan and China are intertwined in a manner that is hard to untangle. Both culturally, politically, financially and geographically. The problem is not that these routers are made in some place across the pacific. Rather these routers should be audited and companies incentivized to fix the security issues. There ought to be regulations that for 5 years of selling the router, fixes would be provided in say 3-5 calendar days of any bugs being discovered. Also there ought to be an open source projects which can be used for this routers, just as linux can be used on Mac and Windoz machines.
Though if the vulnerabilities is at the hardware level then software on top of that can do only so much. Think heartbleed.
I think we’re in violent agreement. You said what I was inferring in only one or two sentences and did it better.