Could it be related to Netgear being manufactured in Vietnam Thailand and Indonesia to avoid China tariffs and that somehow got them through an audit? I only ask if the overall unwritten goal is to avoid China.
That goal isn't even that secret:
https://www.wsj.com/world/china/trump-china-xi-beijing-e2472...:
> Pursuing activities antagonistic to [China] has become further paralyzed by Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick ordering staff that they need his signoff for any China-related actions, people familiar with the matter said. As a result, even senior Commerce officials at times sit by his office waiting or outside the building, watching for his car. Officials at other agencies pursued a ban on a China-linked router maker by styling it as an order that doesn’t name the company or China.
> ...
> One such office had already determined that China-founded router company TP-Link and China-linked internet-connected trucks and buses pose national security risks. Officials thought vulnerabilities in their software could provide China access to spy on U.S. communications or access sensitive infrastructure.
> Interagency reviews had reached a similar conclusion about the risk of TP-Link and supported a ban. Staff had set in motion new rule-making to restrict U.S. sales of those products before they were put on hold and office leadership dismissed, according to officials familiar with the process.
> ...
> Supporters of a ban on TP-Link in March eked out a victory. The Federal Communications Commission announced a ban on new imports of all foreign-made routers, “regardless of the nationality of the producer,” a blanket prohibition that also accomplishes sidelining Chinese routers without naming the country or TP-Link. The new rule was designed in part to minimize disruptions to Trump’s relationship with Xi, people familiar with the matter said.
But fickle bans will never get us there.
They made a donation ... somewhere. Now they're all good. None of Trump's bluster is honest, they're just graft gates.
It wasn't any different during the first administration. I worked at a company slated to be acquired by a foreign company. But the approval just never came from the feds. Then one day the acquiring foreign company CEO visited the White House and that day Trump approved it. Trump even made a little speech about jobs. Then we were all told we were going to be laid off... just like that almost all the American jobs gone. Shortly after one of Trump's companies announced a big land deal in the home country of the acquiring company. MEGA ...
Remember folks: pillage before you burn.
Likely some kind of gold statue was involved. And just like that, laws change in your favor.
In the long term, an absence of competition bodes poorly.
With Asus you can use third-party firmware (e.g., Merlin): is that possible with Netgear?
But I'm incredibly suspicious.
https://old.reddit.com/r/hardware/comments/1slngfa/the_fcc_j...
https://old.reddit.com/r/pwnhub/comments/1s1zz4l/fcc_bans_fo...
https://old.reddit.com/r/pwnhub/comments/1s2thgj/the_fcc_rou...
The posts are AI slop but not incorrect. I didn't have to look anything up to know there was some kind of bribery or insider corruption going on here.
The Netgear thing is more egregious but the quotas are more pervasive. I would like to be rid of both.
???
No obvious reason? What if the Executive Branch is a dog chasing cars?
It’s just doing things.
"There are already foxes in the hen house, but we'll ban new foxes from entering!"
Some of their stuff is also stated to be made in, at least, Lithuania, Malaysia, Vietnam, and China (in no particular order).
And I really don't have much of an idea how much of the devices are made in any of those places, but it's not hard to find an occasional clue.
For example: The Mikrotik wAP AC that is hanging on the wall in the room where I write this is was labelled as having been made in Latvia when I bought it. But the main brainbox IC inside of it, a Qualcomm QCA9556, is manufactured by TSMC. That's probably not something made in a Latvian plant.
What of the rest? The metal and plastic components of the housing? The connectors, the PCBs? The jelly-bean parts on those PCBs?
---
The recent ham-fisted FCC rules make it so any foreign-made component of a new router design excludes it from sale in the US, by default.
It may be harder than you think it is to get this done.
Even the simple stuff might be hard: Do we even make LEDs in the States? I don't mean anything high-power or fancy (we definitely don't make those here), but I also can't find any evidence suggesting that we can even manufacture a lowly status LED in the US at this point.
Or, something mechanical: PCB-mount 8P8C ethernet jacks. I don't find any of those manufactured in the States, either. (Can we even muster up the effort to make those? They're mostly injection-molded plastic, which we haven't forgotten how to do stuff with. But they also use beryllium copper, which is a special kind of a spooky to work with in terms of health hazards.)
I'm not sure that Mikrotik putting together some stuff in Latvia, of all places, represents a very good example: If they were doing in Nebraska what they presently do in Latvia then their products would still be excluded by default.
But your edit makes my original comment unneeded. I was reacting to this jump to “we need ai to solve this!” when the ai is still largely unproven marketing hype from a bunch of highly leveraged ai companies with manic gambler ceos.
An even better option is to partner with a veteran owned entity, which often allows you to bypass the bidding process.
In some places this stuff is so vague that using a minority business (like say SHI) is essentially a sort of tax to win discretionary purchases with governments.
And you think it's a good moment to complain about affirmative action?
This is vague and doesn't say anything. Can you be more specific?
1) Which people? 2) What were Democrats doing?
As of this moment all we have is “data” straight from marketing departments, and a handful of anecdotes.
Do you not see it’s better to stay the same than change things for the worse?