Cable Industry Wants Waiver from FCC Router Ban

WASHINGTON, June 3, 2026 – The cable industry is asking federal regulators for permission to swap certain components of approved Wi-Fi router designs.

NCTA, which represents major broadband Internet Service Providers, said the move would be necessary to “prevent sudden and abrupt disruptions that would harm vast swaths of American consumers who are NCTA members’ customers.”

The Federal Communications Commission added new foreign-made routers — that is, all consumer routers — to its Covered List in March. That means router models not already cleared for sale in the U.S. will be barred from import unless the manufacturer receives a temporary “conditional approval.”

See Breakfast Club Membership Options!

                        See Breakfast Club Membership Options
                    

The agency has been granting those conditional approvals, including for Nokia, Calix, and Alpha Networks gear in recent weeks. Netgear, Adtran, and Eero have also received waivers.

NCTA said in a Tuesday filing it was looking for a similar waiver for its members’ suppliers. The group wanted suppliers to be able to swap out components in router designs that are already cleared by the FCC for sale in the U.S.

The group said surging demand from AI companies had left the substrate that binds chip components together and multiple kinds of memory in exceedingly short supply.

“Unless NCTA members’ suppliers can source memory alternatives as soon as possible, NCTA members expect that router manufacturers may experience supply shortages imminently, with significant supply shortages this year,” the group wrote. “The impact on consumers would be immediate and detrimental — access to broadband would be more expensive and more difficult to deploy.”

NCTA’s waiver request was led by top attorneys Russel Hanser and Traci Biswese. Hanser is a former National Telecommunications and Information Administration official, and Biswese joined NCTA from Meta.

As the cable group noted Tuesday, the FCC granted a similar waiver for AT&T on behalf of its own suppliers last month, noting “the unavoidable supply-chain shortages and the public interest need to prevent disruptions in the availability of broadband for AT&T’s customers.”

CTIA, the wireless industry trade group, dispatched general counsel Umair Javed after the AT&T waiver to urge the FCC to consider generalizing elements of company-specific waivers that could apply to groups of companies.

The wireless industry also wanted more clarity on the agency’s definition of "router" for the purposes of its March national security determination.

The FCC said foreign-made routers posed a cybersecurity risk, citing hacks like Salt Typhoon backed by the Chinese government and others, when it banned new models. To get conditional approval and import new routers again, companies have to submit a plan to onshore their manufacturing.

Consumer routers are almost exclusively manufactured in China, Taiwan, and Vietnam, according to pro-Wi-Fi group Wi-Fi now. Bringing that process to the U.S. could be prohibitively expensive for many companies, according to Dell’Oro Group vice president Jeff Heynan.