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Notes -
Can anyone speculate why the FCC has banned foreign-made routers?
As mentioned below, there seems to be a wide exemption for anything not marketed at the consumer level. I will be very curious to see how that ends up being applied to hardware leased or provided to end users by their ISP. I'm guessing the exemption will apply to those units even though the hardware and firmware is of foreign origin, because the ISPs plausibly have access to/control over the firmware.
The bulk of my employer's (major US cable company) current generation of leased routers are white label units with our branding and custom exterior shell but manufactured by a subsidiary of Asus based on a generic router board that they also supply to other ISPs in a similar arrangement, at least from what I've gathered looking at the manuals and the Asus website counterparts.
The other major OEMs that made our previous gen routers/modems (and still make our current gen standalone modems), Hitron and Ubee, are also both Taiwanese. Arris was nominally American, even after their acquisition by Commscope (also American), but their manufacturing was overseas and they were recently divested to Vantiva (French, f.k.a. Technicolor, which is also where Cisco/Scientific Atlanta's coax division ended up).
A side note, it would probably be better for our reputation if we just told customers we were giving them Asus hardware rather than using our own branding. Cable companies are funny.
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