Thousands of specialised routers used by volunteers to measure Australian broadband performance have been disabled by remote command after the country's competition regulator finished its Measuring Broadband Australia program. Volunteers are now being told to dispose of the equipment, even though the hardware remains functional and can be converted into ordinary Wi-Fi routers. The decision has triggered criticism from participants who describe it as a preventable contribution to electronic waste.

What was the program?

In 2020, the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission, better known as the ACCC, launched the Measuring Broadband Australia program. The initiative recruited thousands of volunteers and supplied them with special router-like devices, called whiteboxes, made by SamKnows. The purpose was to measure the real-world speed and performance of fixed-line broadband plans sold to Australian consumers. The program focused primarily on services delivered over the National Broadband Network, or NBN, Australia's government-owned wholesale open-access broadband network. It also looked at services provided over other access networks.

The NBN was built to provide fast internet to homes and businesses across Australia, but its performance has varied depending on the underlying technology used in each connection. Because of that, consumers have often been confused about whether they are getting the speeds they pay for. The ACCC's program helped address that confusion by collecting independent performance data. The whiteboxes were installed at volunteers' homes and connected to their broadband modems. Using test servers maintained by SamKnows and hosted in Australia, the devices ran regular tests of upload speed, download speed, latency, and other metrics. The ACCC used the results to produce public reports that showed how different retail service providers performed against their advertised speeds.

The program ran for several years, and a succession of reports gave Australians unusually detailed insight into the quality of their broadband. The final report was released last month, and with it, the program came to an end.

Routers bricked after the program ended

Volunteers were told in mid-June that the service would formally end on 30 June. An email informed them that their whitebox would be disabled and their SamKnows One account closed. It also said that measurement and registration data would be deleted in accordance with retention obligations under the end-user licence agreement. After that date, the routers stopped collecting data.

What upset some volunteers was that the devices themselves were not defective. They were deliberately disabled by the operator even though they were still perfectly usable. One volunteer who asked not to be named said the routers were still working and that the decision to brick them was an avoidable e-waste risk.

The ACCC has not said how many whiteboxes were disabled. However, in a December 2020 report, it said it expected to release around 4,000 whiteboxes over the program's duration, and that more than 2,600 had already been distributed by that point. The ACCC also said it retained an 'adequate pool' of whiteboxes to allow for expansion of reporting to emerging retail service providers and new speed tier plans.

Can the whiteboxes be salvaged?

The volunteer who raised concerns pointed out that the whiteboxes run a custom version of OpenWRT, an open-source operating system based on Linux for embedded devices. This means, in principle, the devices could easily be reflashed to operate as normal Wi-Fi routers with decent performance. The volunteer said they had already reflashed their own device, an operation requiring a soldering iron when done without company support, and it was 'now working great as a Wi-Fi router running OpenWRT'. They added that 'everything already exists to do this'.

Despite that, the advice given to volunteers was simple: unplug the whitebox and dispose of it in an environmentally responsible manner. The email from SamKnows listed free e-waste recycling services at local councils, resource recovery centres, Officeworks, JB Hi-Fi, and Harvey Norman stores.

For the volunteer, that response was not good enough. They said it was a shame to see thousands of perfectly good devices disabled simply because the company could not be bothered to send out a final firmware update that would open the devices up to end users.

A history of similar projects

This is not the first time SamKnows has supplied routers for a broadband measurement project. In the United States, SamKnows distributed 9,000 routers to volunteers for a study commissioned by the Federal Communications Commission. The results were published in 2011. What happened to those 9,000 routers afterwards has never been publicly explained.

The current situation in Australia raises similar questions about what happens to purpose-built test hardware once a study ends. The environmental impact of electronic waste is a growing problem worldwide. Functional routers contain circuit boards, metal components, and plastic housings. When they are thrown away, valuable materials are lost, and hazardous substances can leak into the environment if they are not properly recycled. Many experts argue that electronics should be kept in use for as long as possible, and that producers and program sponsors should plan for reuse or refurbishment at the end of a project.

In this case, the economic and environmental cost of manufacturing and distributing thousands of routers was already paid. A firmware update that unlocked the devices would have allowed volunteers to keep using them. It would also have reduced the demand for new consumer routers, many of which are made with newly mined minerals and shipped around the world. The alternative chosen by the ACCC and SamKnows was to disable the devices and encourage recycling, a less sustainable outcome by comparison.

Unanswered questions

Why were the routers disabled instead of opened up? The companies involved have not provided a clear answer. SamKnows is now part of Cisco, which acquired it in 2023. That acquisition happened years after the ACCC selected SamKnows as the testing provider for the MBA program. Enquiries made to SamKnows went unanswered, and its website now redirects to ThousandEyes, a networking intelligence company also owned by Cisco.

A representative for Cisco said that per SamKnows's agreement with the ACCC, all inquiries related to the Measuring Broadband Australia program should be directed to the ACCC. The ACCC itself released a prepared statement noting that the whiteboxes were manufactured and supplied by SamKnows and used to measure broadband performance. It said that with the conclusion of the program, the whiteboxes had been disabled and were no longer operational, and that volunteers were encouraged to unplug them and dispose of them through free e-waste recycling services.

The statement did not explain why the whiteboxes were disabled rather than reflashed, nor did it respond specifically to e-waste concerns. It is possible that SamKnows, Cisco, and the ACCC are concerned about future support and liability if recycled devices have software issues. It is also possible that contractual obligations require the equipment to be retired in a particular way. None of these reasons have been publicly confirmed.

In the meantime, the practical reality is that many of these routers can be saved. Enthusiasts have already shared instructions online for recovering disabled whiteboxes and installing a standard version of OpenWRT. With a soldering iron and some patience, a device that was scheduled for the waste bin can become a useful household router again. That makes the decision to brick thousands of still-functioning units all the more difficult to understand.

Source: Ars Technica News