TP-Link opened preorders for the Archer 8 Ultra, its first WiFi 8 router, and one of the first WiFi 8 routers on the market, in the UK, Germany, and Australia. Surprisingly, the US is not on the list. The FCC put every foreign-produced consumer router on its Covered List in March, and TP-Link holds no Conditional Approval, the exemption from it. The agency’s official reasoning is security, somehow based off of a router’s origin of production.

The concern over origin is misguided to begin with. The FCC points to the Volt, Flax, and Salt Typhoon attacks as examples of cyber attacks against network equipment. The Justice Department said the botnet Volt Typhoon used mostly targeted Cisco and Netgear routers that had reached end of life. Point of origin isn’t the defining vulnerability. Cisco and Netgear are both American, and Netgear holds a Conditional Approval. What those routers lacked was patches, and Conditional Approval, whatever commitment Netgear promised, did not warrant the security patches. Approval requires disclosures on ownership and supply chain and a plan to manufacture in the US.

Manufacturers, like it or not, will drop support for older products at some point. The companies won’t extend patches out of pure moral obligation to protect American consumers. There’s also a deadline on how long they can provide patches. Under the FCC’s rules, the listing would have prohibited firmware updates even for routers authorized before it. A waiver permits them, and its deadline has been extended at least once, but it’s a deadline being shifted, not the lift of the ban itself.

From my point of view, there are at least two types of router buyers: a. those who use whatever they are given, very often by the ISP, however old it is, and never change the password, b. those who buy for a specific need, say a Netgear Orbi for coverage, and are not necessarily interested in managing a heavy-duty network, or pure prosumers. The Covered List works for none of them. Group A loses the chance for a free upgrade, which a lot of the time means the cheapest denominator, and its aging hardware is unlikely to get upgrades, as the cases have shown. Group B loses new routers from makers without a Conditional Approval to try in the first place. This is on top of the fact that a closed market effectively raises prices overall for both groups.

Routers have become such a necessity in regular households that I can see the justification for government involvement. But if anything, manufacturers need to be guided into something like the lemon law for cars: a set number of years of security patches they are forced to commit to. Current guidance, or lack thereof, simply doesn’t do anyone justice.