Yesterday, the Federal Communications commission prohibited the sale of “new, foreign-made routers” in the U.S. Wired ran a good explainer with links to pertinent places on the FCC web site.

As I have explained to many people many times, the AyrMesh Hubs are not routers – they are just WiFi access points and associated equipment – none of them do any routing, filtering, or throttling. Furthermore, they have all been previously approved by the FCC – they are not “new” models. So, as far as we can tell, they are not covered by the FCC ban.

To review briefly, the concern the FCC has is that foreign-built routers have foreign-built firmware, which can contain “back doors” that could be used for stealing data or disrupting networks. There have been “worms” in the wild that have infiltrated consumer-grade routers (and enterprise-class routers, I should add…) and caused problems, so it’s not an entirely crazy idea.

The AyrMesh products, first, are not routers and should NEVER be connected directly to the Internet – they should only be used on a private subnet behind a router. Second, the AyrMesh products are all based on a version of the open-source OpenWRT Linux distribution, which is constantly under review for security bugs, and which we review before we include it on our products. Finally, of course, we’re not going to put in any software that might exfiltrate your data or cause network instability. So, even though the hardware (electronics and plastic cases) are manufactured overseas, we have complete control over the software (that actually makes it work). I am not worried about AyrMesh products being prohibited currently.

Of course, future FCC decisions are uncertain. We have AyrMesh Hubs and Receivers in stock now; if you have been considering getting an AyrMesh network for your farm, there’s no better time than the present.