The FCC wants to ban Chinese labs from certifying electronics, but 75% of devices are tested there now

[midian182]

What just happened? The FCC has voted unanimously to move forward with a proposal that would bar all labs in China and Hong Kong from testing and certifying electronic devices for sale in the United States. The agency says the measure is about national security, but it could create a major headache for hardware makers that rely on Chinese facilities to approve everything from smartphones and laptops to routers, cameras, and smart home devices.

Any product that emits radio frequencies must pass through the FCC's equipment authorization process before it can be legally imported or sold in the US. That includes the obvious stuff like phones, tablets, PCs, Wi-Fi routers, along with the growing number of gadgets that insist on adding Bluetooth or Wi-Fi whether they need it or not.

The FCC says roughly 75% of US electronics are currently tested in China. That figure was central to the agency's earlier "Bad Labs" push, which targeted testing facilities owned, controlled, or directed by companies on the FCC's Covered List, such as Huawei and ZTE. FCC Chair Brendan Carr argued that allowing potentially untrustworthy labs to certify equipment for the US market created an obvious loophole.

This latest proposal goes much further. Rather than focusing only on labs linked to blacklisted companies or foreign adversary governments, it would remove all Chinese and Hong Kong-based labs from the FCC certification pipeline. The commission also wants to create a faster approval process for products tested in US labs or in countries not considered national security risks.

Reports note that 126 of the FCC's 591 recognized test labs are located in mainland China or Hong Kong, with 50 in Shenzhen alone. Many labs of these labs sit close to the factories where the devices are built, making testing cheaper and faster.

The change could also become more expensive. Chinese labs reportedly charge around $400 to $1,300 for basic FCC testing, while US equivalents can cost $3,000 to $4,000. Large companies such as Apple, Samsung, Sony, and LG will likely be able to reroute work to labs elsewhere, but smaller manufacturers could face longer waits, higher compliance costs, and delayed US launches.

The vote does not make the ban immediate. It opens a public comment period, expected to last 60 to 90 days before the FCC issues a final rule and transition timeline.

Beijing, unsurprisingly, is not pleased. China's Commerce Ministry accused the US of discriminatory restrictions and warned it would take necessary measures if the proposal is implemented.

For consumers, the devices themselves are not being banned. But if certification becomes slower and more expensive, some of that cost could eventually show up on store shelves at a time when prices are already high.

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The FCC wants to ban Chinese labs from certifying electronics, but 75% of devices are tested there now

 

[The Talking Tech]

Trump wants to make radical changes overnight disregarding all the processes that would have to be followed for an adequate transition.

Shoot first ask questions later...that's the reckless actions of the Trump administration.

 

[toooooot]

The longer an abusive relationship goes on, the more painful it is to split up.
There is absolutely no common sense in helping grow a nation that is almost
openly hostile toward us. We must split up, no matter the cost.

 

[NumberNine]

Guess which direction prices will go?

 

[yRaz]

Maybe we should have thought if that before we spent the last 40 years exporting American industry to China

 

[m4a4]

Maybe we should have thought if that before we spent the last 40 years exporting American industry to China

You can blame politicians who magically got much richer than their salary would suggest, and the voters who couldn't look past the "cheap" prices...

 

[Hecate91]

We're going to end up paying the cost of politicians being greedy who have only now realized we shouldn't let other countries have every step in the manufacturing process.

 

[Hecate91]

The longer an abusive relationship goes on, the more painful it is to split up.
There is absolutely no common sense in helping grow a nation that is almost
openly hostile toward us. We must split up, no matter the cost.

So would you pay 2-3x more for any electronics device? The cost pushed on companies to open testing labs in the US, and pay test engineers will inevitably get pushed back onto the consumer.
New routers will essentially be banned in the US,because politicians allowed those to be outsourced long ago, costs are expected to rise to meet the requirement to be made outside of China, and the cost of every router having to be approved.

 

[pnntmp]

Price doesn't matter here.
Anything coming from China is potentially dangerous and/or low quality, so it should be gotten rid of regardless of price concerns and other considerations.
When the Chinese labs are banned, the US labs will build up capacity due to the increased & guaranteed demand, which will lower the price. There will be short term problems, but nothing serious.
The sooner this happens, the better.

 

[Eldrach]

Price doesn't matter here.
Anything coming from China is potentially dangerous and/or low quality, so it should be gotten rid of regardless of price concerns and other considerations.
When the Chinese labs are banned, the US labs will build up capacity due to the increased & guaranteed demand, which will lower the price. There will be short term problems, but nothing serious.
The sooner this happens, the better.

What is your source for confirming that the 126 testing labs in China are not doing the testing properly?

The thing is, China makes alot of crap - but the items going through the FCC approved testing for sale in the US are not amongst them. It's the Temu stuff people order directly that hasn't been through testing that can be hazardous.

Not saying that doing domestic testing is bad - but I assure you this is not about quality, it's about politics.

The US is already excluding more and more items, and it has not led to anything but more expenses and less availability for the US population, and there's no impending improvement in sight as the US is still 5-8 years away from reaching any form of mass production of electronics - which at that point will still only be "packing" facilities as the components will still be made in China.

Bringing production back to the US is a good idea, but it simply cannot be done in the timeframe proposed.
China has spent the last 30 years building advanced production facilities - they are the best country in the world when it comes to production at the moment (exluding TSMC in Taiwan).

I agree that a world monopoly on producing critical components isn't good for anyone, but cutting ties is something that needs to be done with proper planning, includiing proper supply lines of raw materials

 

[psycros]

The sooner we go back to getting our electronics from Japan as God intended, the better.

 

[onebignerd]

Build the plants and infrastructure BEFORE you cut off the supply lines!! The U.S will be running 1970s era technology by the time you FCC morons finish banning technology. The one detail that slipped your attention, the U.S doesn't manufacture this stuff. Where do you think we are going to get it?!!!

 

[TooQik]

If something is tested to a standard it shouldn't matter where the testing is performed, that's the whole point of having standards.

 

[scoffer]

Hey, corporate leeches. How's the whole "Lets outsource everything to China" thing going for you nowadays?

 

[Endymio]

What is your source for confirming that the 126 testing labs in China are not doing the testing properly?

You didn't read the article. It's not the CPSC or OSHA making this move, but the FCC. That should have clued you in. It's not because of incompetence on the part of those Chinese labs, but collusion. Each and every one of those 126 test labs is controlled by the CCP. a government that not only employs two million people to spy on and censor its own citizens from Internet content, but has repeatedly forced private Chinese firms to to do the same on foreign soil.

Multiple Chinese-based routers have been tied to cyberattacks, and hundreds of different IoT devices -- everything from security cameras to shopping apps -- has been found to contain CCP-controlled spyware and other backdoors. We either act now, or one day you wake up to find China has shut down the entire US, invaded Taiwan and several other neighbors, and declared a new global Pax Sinica .... something many infliuential Chinese military leaders are already advocating for.

 

[Eldrach]

You didn't read the article. It's not the CPSC or OSHA making this move, but the FCC. That should have clued you in. It's not because of incompetence on the part of those Chinese labs, but collusion. Each and every one of those 126 test labs is controlled by the CCP. a government that not only employs two million people to spy on and censor its own citizens from Internet content, but has repeatedly forced private Chinese firms to to do the same on foreign soil.

Multiple Chinese-based routers have been tied to cyberattacks, and hundreds of different IoT devices -- everything from security cameras to shopping apps -- has been found to contain CCP-controlled spyware and other backdoors. We either act now, or one day you wake up to find China has shut down the entire US, invaded Taiwan and several other neighbors, and declared a new global Pax Sinica .... something many infliuential Chinese military leaders are already advocating for.

The 126 labs were FCC approved. They want to domesticate that, and that's OK.
Concerning backdoors, there are plenty of routers from China with open source software, where you can easily eliminate the possiblity of a backdoor.
Concerning backdoors, Apple got in trouble for not allowing the NSA to have a backdoor into their product line, which gets me thinking that most other vendors that didn't get it in trouble, have backdoors built into them.
Spying is bad, but you shouldn't think your US made products will be free of backdoor access.
The world is a dark place atm - pretty sad sight to be honest.

 

[Endymio]

The 126 labs were FCC approved...

And now the FCC realizes what a mistake it was to ignore the Chinese threat for so long ... rather like Britain in the 1930s doing nothing as Germany went from having a 1:3 ratio with British military forces to a 3:1 advantage.

Concerning backdoors, there are plenty of routers from China with open source software....

No, there isn't "plenty". There's a few routers that allow you to flash your own firmware ... but how many users will do that? A couple claim to have open-source firmware already installed ... but now many people actually perform byte-level comparisons to verify that?

Concerning backdoors, Apple got in trouble for not allowing the NSA to have a backdoor into their product line

The NSA doesn't keep three million of it's own citizens in slave-labor genocide camps. Perhaps you should spent a few years in one of the Chinese ones, to better understand the threat.

BTW, in the US, agencies like the NSA must **ask** companies for backdoor access. In China, their laws literally require companies to do so.

 

[Eldrach]

And now the FCC realizes what a mistake it was to ignore the Chinese threat for so long ... rather like Britain in the 1930s doing nothing as Germany went from having a 1:3 ratio with British military forces to a 3:1 advantage.


No, there isn't "plenty". There's a few routers that allow you to flash your own firmware ... but how many users will do that? A couple claim to have open-source firmware already installed ... but now many people actually perform byte-level comparisons to verify that?


The NSA doesn't keep three million of it's own citizens in slave-labor genocide camps. Perhaps you should spent a few years in one of the Chinese ones, to better understand the threat.

BTW, in the US, agencies like the NSA must **ask** companies for backdoor access. In China, their laws literally require companies to do so.

Don't approve of Chinese politics, but the fact that there even "are" backdoors into routers in the US, is also tragic.

I'm glad I live under GDPR laws tbh.

 

[Hecate91]

And now the FCC realizes what a mistake it was to ignore the Chinese threat for so long ... rather like Britain in the 1930s doing nothing as Germany went from having a 1:3 ratio with British military forces to a 3:1 advantage.

The FCC is only now realizing it about 30 years too late.

No, there isn't "plenty". There's a few routers that allow you to flash your own firmware ... but how many users will do that? A couple claim to have open-source firmware already installed ... but now many people actually perform byte-level comparisons to verify that?

Most users don't care where their router comes from, it simply needs to turn on and provide a reliable connection.
It doesn't matter where the routers or the software comes from when standards exist, both the hardware and software is developed all over the world, politicians are clueless how any of this works, or maybe they know exactly what they're doing and want to impose rules with an unrealistic allowed amount of time for changes to be made,also when the infrastructure doesn't exist to manufacture routers in the US, so everyone is forced to rent a router from their ISP.

The NSA doesn't keep three million of it's own citizens in slave-labor genocide camps. Perhaps you should spent a few years in one of the Chinese ones, to better understand the threat.

BTW, in the US, agencies like the NSA must **ask** companies for backdoor access. In China, their laws literally require companies to do so.

I don't like what China is doing politically, but you're completely ignoring the fact that the US has their own backdoors and spyware in routers.
And then there's the USA Patriot Act, or just see what Palantir is doing, getting very close with the US govt and many tech companies.

 

[jbright]

50 labs in Shenzhen alone, located next to the factories, is actually a really elegant supply chain solution that nobody talks about. You build the thing, walk it down the street, get it certified, ship it. Unwinding that isn't just a cost problem, it's a logistics redesign for an industry that spent 20 years optimizing around that geography.

 

[Megalomaniac]

When Trump is gone, everyone can breath a sigh of relief and go back to business as usual.

 

[Hecate91]

People calling everything they disagree with "TDS" is absolutely ridiculous while also ironically complaining about politics.
I've been here long enough to see mods don't care about politics being brought into nearly every topic from the same people.
This topic is a legit concern, but the time frame in which Trump's administration wants to shift everything back to the US isn't, none of the infrastructure for manufacturing and testing electronics exists in the US anymore and it would take years to test and build electronics again, with a crumbling economy being held up by an AI bubble, most people wouldn't be willing to pay double for a laptop or router.

 

[Endymio]

The FCC is only now realizing it about 30 years too late.

So your plan is to simply throw up our hands in the air and give up?

Most users don't care where their router comes from, it simply needs to turn on and provide a reliable connection.

When that router contains CCP spyware and back doors enabling cyberattacks -- they care.

It doesn't matter where the routers or the software comes from when standards exist, both the hardware and software is developed all over the world

You really lack total understanding of the issues here. The CCP has **already** been shown to have repeatedly required Chinese firms to use methods like this to spy on US citizens and military personnel.

....you're completely ignoring the fact that the US has their own backdoors and spyware in routers.

You're completely ignoring the fact the US doesn't use those backdoors to send secret police to arrest people for political dissent. Nor to allow its military to annex neighboring countries, keep millions of its own citizens in slave-labor genocide camps, nor employ an army of two million Internet censors to ensure the populace sees no facts which don't align with the party view.

 

[loki1944]

Good.

 

[mjuice7]

The longer an abusive relationship goes on, the more painful it is to split up.
There is absolutely no common sense in helping grow a nation that is almost
openly hostile toward us. We must split up, no matter the cost.

too true. china should break up with the usa.