There is no consumer Wi-Fi router entirely made in America, complicating the Trump administration's push to eliminate foreign involvement from the home internet hardware supply chain. Concerned that foreign-made routers could contain backdoors exploited by hackers or hostile intelligence services, citing incidents such as Salt Typhoon, Volt and Flax, the FCC banned international home routers in March 2026, prohibiting software updates for existing foreign-made devices after 2027. However, the router industry is so deeply reliant on Southeast Asian manufacturing, design and components that a fully domestic supply chain is proving unrealistic to achieve.

Chinese manufacturer T.P. Link, which still produces around 35% of US home routers (down from over 60% in 2024), has met the FCC to seek conditional approval, pointing to hundreds of millions of dollars invested in a US-based subsidiary in Irvine, California. Taiwanese firms including ASUS, Synology and D-Link also fall under the restrictions. Facing supply shortages in materials such as substrate and memory modules, the FCC has already relaxed part of the ruling, allowing continued software and firmware updates until at least 1 January 2029, a move critics say exposes contradictions in the policy, since it may leave more security gaps than it closes.