Thousands of internet-testing routers distributed to Australian volunteers were remotely disabled at the end of June 2026 after the government programme they supported concluded, prompting concerns about avoidable electronic waste. The devices, known as "whiteboxes" and supplied by SamKnows, had been handed out from 2020 under the Australian Competition & Consumer Commission's (ACCC) Measuring Broadband Australia programme to monitor the speed and performance of broadband plans across the NBN and other networks. Volunteers were told their units would be switched off and their accounts closed, even though the routers themselves remained fully functional — raising questions about why working hardware was bricked rather than released for reuse.

The ACCC did not specify how many devices were disabled, though a 2020 report indicated it expected to distribute around 4,000 whiteboxes and had issued over 2,600 by that December. One anonymous volunteer noted that the boxes run a custom version of the open-source OpenWRT operating system and can be reflashed into capable Wi-Fi routers, arguing that a final firmware update could have opened the devices to end users instead of consigning them to recycling. SamKnows — acquired by Cisco in 2023 — advised volunteers to dispose of the units responsibly via e-waste services, while Cisco directed enquiries to the ACCC, and neither SamKnows nor the ACCC gave a clear explanation for the decision. A similar SamKnows study distributed 9,000 routers in the US for a 2011 report, with no public account of what became of them.