Build your own. Fuck these people.
this post was submitted on 15 Apr 2026
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Netgear is the one hardware company I have an absolute and complete avoidance for. If someone gave me anything from Netgear for free. It would go straight into the electronics recycling bin at my local dump and I'd go pay full price for a different brand.
Isn't this only for "residential" routers
What defines a commercial router? How much are we talking? In $$$
We don't even need the Access Point - those are still allowed to be sold.
Netgear is absolute shit. Never had a good product from them. Perfect for the US.
My NetGear router still has a uselessly incomplete implementation of VLANs after 5+ years of updates, I was ready to replace it out of frustration. Gen 6 wireless is getting old hat anyway
Use a old PC and pfsense or opnsense. Netgate the maintainer of pfsense is US based. OPNsense is a fork of pfsense after they went corporate.
Netgear is trash
boy, I wonder what palantir backdoors they definitely won't have.
Control of the routers
Control of online identity
What could go wrong?
It could be worse... we could be living the alternate watchdogs legion timeline... where Albion wins.
And looks like netgear is off my list of trustworthiness. Used them for 20 years. Best get looking for a new one.
You can build your own router fyi
Mikrotik just released a new overkill router with wifi7 and 2.5G Ethernet. Might pick one of those up in order to avoid the inevitable fuckery for the next few years.
ASUS is nice
Yeh I also have an ASU’s. Gonna dig it out.
So you now can be absolutely certain that Netgear is actively and openly giving fascist authoritarians what they want.
At least before you could be fairly certain it was just the secretive three letter guys that roughly knew what they were doing at least. Now it's even the blatant dumb fucks in charge.
Still need to wait for more details on what Netgear agreed on with the FCC to get the conditional approval. Otherwise it is hard to evaluate if this is a good or bad thing.
Found the details: $$$
Definitely will have no backdoor or monitoring installed as default.
It's not clear what makes Netgear's currently foreign-made routers safer than, say, an Amazon Eero 7 or a Google Nest WiFi Pro.
This is all evidence that it's not really about safety. It's a clumsy attempt to strongarm tech companies into setting up factories in the USA. It may also be an attempt to create an environment in which it's easier to install US government backdoors on every home router.
It's a clumsy attempt to strongarm tech companies into setting up factories in the USA
Evidently not since Netgear has zero factories in the USA and plans to bring zero factories to the USA in the future.
It may also be an attempt to create an environment in which it's easier to install US government backdoors on every home router.
It’s this one.
As well as a clumsy attempt to thwart foreign back doors. Unless they've paid for them. Or are Israel.
But how hilarious it is that Google and Amazon, already bending the knee to the emperor, did not get a pass.
The cool thing is that you can make basically any combination of parts into a router if you install Linux or BSD on it. Not terribly helpful for end user consumers that will get shafted by this, but at the end of the day it’s just a small computer.
Otherwise, smuggle some “foreign routers” in from Mexico or Canada like it’s the prohibition era?
The regulations also only cover consumer routers... I foresee more people getting racks installed in their house soon, lol.
This seems awfully convenient for everyone, but the consumer.
TrendNet is far superior and based on Torrence anyway. Netgear and Linksys are junk anyway. Get yourself an open hardware platform, or something that can run OpenWRT. Skip the corporate manufacturers who all kind of suck.
MikroTik over here.
I second mikrotik
Do they run openwrt?
I just put OpenWRT on a Google Wi-Fi puck. It's been great so far.
I've got three of the old Google wifi pucks, all running openwrt. Bit of a mess around to find a working flash drive but no complaints now.
Only wifi 5 but all honesty that's all we need at home.
I have 2 of them running openwrt, one is my main router. WiFi radio doesnt work though because of broadcom.
Not the ones with Broadcom chips.
Every netgear router I own does.
Not surprising . . . . .and this still does nothing to help domestic network device production in the US, since Netgear outsources their manufacturing to Taiwan.
Er, there’s at least 5 consumer router manufacturers that meet the new requirements. Interestingly, one of them is TP-Link.
lol, IIRC a government agency said TP-Link is not trustworthy.
Translation: they refused to allow us to inject telemetry into their firmware.
That’s what makes it interesting 🤔
Sounds like a non-tariff barrier to trade that other countries should bring up in trade negotiations.
The very same trade negotiations where all other countries have basically taken the stance that “we’ll just grin and bear it and wait for three years until he’s gone”. The EU is currently accepting 15% tariffs on their goods and mandating no tariffs in return.