America Just Banned Foreign Routers and Only Elon Musk’s Starlink Makes the Cut

The US bans foreign-made routers effective immediately, a sweeping Federal Communications Commission (FCC) decision that bars all new foreign-manufactured consumer internet routers from the American market, citing a pattern of cyberattacks traced back to foreign actors, predominantly linked to the Chinese government. The move carries an uncomfortable irony at its core: almost every router currently sold in the US is made outside of it.

What the FCC Actually Did and Why Now

The FCC updated its list of equipment deemed insufficiently secure for use in the United States. Added to that list in one fell swoop: every new consumer-grade router manufactured outside American borders.

The decision did not emerge from nowhere. It follows a ruling made just days earlier, on Friday, by a coalition of US national security agencies that formally concluded foreign-made routers posed what they described as “unacceptable risks” to the United States. Those risks span two distinct but connected threats: the potential for cyberattacks capable of disrupting critical infrastructure and the quieter, slower threat of espionage and intellectual property theft conducted through compromised home and business networks.

“Malicious actors have exploited security gaps in foreign-made routers to attack American households, disrupt networks, enable espionage, and facilitate intellectual property theft,” the FCC stated in its announcement.

The FCC specifically pointed to three high-profile cyberattack operations, codenamed Volt Typhoon, Flax Typhoon, and Salt Typhoon, carried out between 2024 and 2025 and aimed at American infrastructure. US government investigations attributed all three attacks to actors operating within or on behalf of the Chinese government. In each case, foreign-made routers served as the entry point.

The TP-Link Problem That Became Everyone’s Problem

No brand better illustrates the anxiety driving this decision than TP-Link.

The Chinese router manufacturer is one of the best-selling brands on Amazon in the United States. Its devices are found in millions of American homes, small businesses, and offices. Last year, TP-Link became the subject of intense political scrutiny following a series of cyberattacks in which its routers were identified as compromised access points.

TP-Link did not cause the FCC ban alone, but it crystallized a concern that had been building for years. If a dominant Chinese router brand could be implicated in attacks on American networks, the argument for treating all foreign-made routers as a systemic vulnerability rather than isolated incidents becomes difficult to dismiss.

The ban now makes that argument official policy.

The Catch: Almost Every Router Is Made Abroad

Here is where the FCC’s decision collides with commercial reality in an almost paradoxical way.

The vast majority of internet routers sold in the United States are assembled or manufactured outside the country, predominantly in China or Taiwan. This includes routers from brands that are entirely American in origin and identity.

Netgear, one of the most recognisable router brands in the US and a company headquartered in San Jose, California, manufactures all of its products abroad. Under the new FCC rules, every new Netgear router model built outside the US is now subject to the ban, regardless of where the company is registered or where its engineers work.

The ban applies even to routers that are designed in the US but manufactured overseas. The country of design offers no exemption. Only the country of manufacture matters.

This creates an industry-wide crisis. Router brands across the board, American, European, and Asian alike, will now need to either shift manufacturing to US soil or navigate a new and demanding approval process just to stay in the American market.

The Only Router That Escapes the Ban

In a detail that has not gone unnoticed, there is one prominent exception to the general absence of American-made routers: the Starlink WiFi router, manufactured in Texas by SpaceX, Elon Musk’s aerospace and technology company.

Starlink’s router, built domestically, faces no barrier under the new FCC rules. In a market suddenly stripped of most of its competition, that is a commercial advantage of extraordinary scale, handed, inadvertently or otherwise, to a company already at the centre of American technology and defence conversations.

Whether that coincidence raises eyebrows will depend on who is watching.

What Happens to Routers Already in Homes?

Critically, the ban does not require Americans to throw out their existing routers. Devices already owned and in use are not affected. The restriction applies exclusively to new device models, meaning routers that have not yet been imported, marketed, or sold in the US at the time the ban takes effect.

For companies that manufacture routers outside the US and want to continue selling in the American market, there is a path forward, but it is neither simple nor guaranteed.

Manufacturers must apply to the FCC for conditional approval. That application requires full disclosure of the company’s foreign investors and any foreign influence over its operations. It also requires a concrete plan to relocate router manufacturing to American soil.

Two government agencies, the Department of Defense and the Department of Homeland Security, retain the authority to exempt specific routers from the ban if they deem those devices acceptable. However, as of Monday, neither agency had added any router to its exemption list.

A Global Industry Forced to Reckon With America’s Demands

The implications of this decision extend well beyond American borders.

For global router manufacturers, the US market is too large to abandon. But retooling supply chains to manufacture in the US is expensive, time-consuming, and operationally complex. The conditional approval pathway, with its requirements for investor disclosure and manufacturing relocation plans, is designed not as a welcome mat but as a high bar.

For consumers, the short-term impact may be limited. Existing routers continue working. But as the current stock of foreign-made routers sells through and new models cannot legally replace them, the market will face a genuine supply crunch, one that could push prices sharply higher or leave shelves with significantly fewer options.