Drilling Down on Uncle Sam's Proposed TP-Link Ban

Re:Drilling Down on Uncle Sam's Proposed TP-Link Ban by forinti on Sunday November 09, 2025 @03:09PM (#45868694)

TP-Link let me down twice.

I bought a cellphone from them many years ago and they never really supported it and I couldn't even buy a replacement battery.

Recently I bought a router with the firm intent of installing OpenWRT, but I received a newer revision that had a different CPU, less RAM, and less flash memory.

These events left a bad impression, but they do make affordable stuff with reasonable quality.

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Re:Drilling Down on Uncle Sam's Proposed TP-Link Ban by mbreese on Sunday November 09, 2025 @03:37PM (#45868937)

> Recently I bought a router with the firm intent of installing OpenWRT, but I received a newer revision that had a different CPU, less RAM, and less flash memory.

This also happened many years ago with Linksys (prior to Cisco). It’s not that uncommon for manufacturers to release new revisions of hardware without necessarily making it clear to the purchaser. If their purpose is to deliver a router and they can shave a few cents off the BOM with less RAM, but it still works with their software, why would they care. And once new revisions have been released into the supply chain, it can be hard to know exactly what version you are buying.

In the Linksys case, IIRC they eventually re-released the first revision WRT54G as the WRT54GL (for Linux), so that people who wanted different firmware could get the exact hardware they wanted.

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Re:Drilling Down on Uncle Sam's Proposed TP-Link Ban by myself248 on Sunday November 09, 2025 @05:03PM (#45869648)

Wouldn't it be nice if that was illegal? Sell whatever, but label it accurately, it's different hardware so it needs to have a different version label in the listing or something.

We see this all the time with SSDs, where a high-spec model is released to reviewers, then a low-spec model is mass-produced and sold under the same model number. That's fraud, isn't it? Shouldn't it be?

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Re:Drilling Down on Uncle Sam's Proposed TP-Link Ban by cesarb on Sunday November 09, 2025 @07:00PM (#45870584)

> but label it accurately, it's different hardware so it needs to have a different version label

In my experience, TP-Link always has the hardware revision on a label on the outside of the box.

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Re:Drilling Down on Uncle Sam's Proposed TP-Link Ban by forinti on Sunday November 09, 2025 @07:13PM (#45870676)

It's small text on a small label that online vendors don't bother to check.

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Re:Drilling Down on Uncle Sam's Proposed TP-Link Ban by tremon on Monday November 10, 2025 @08:52PM (#45883226)

Then don't buy online, if you can't trust the vendor?

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Re:Drilling Down on Uncle Sam's Proposed TP-Link Ban by tpmoney on Sunday November 09, 2025 @09:56PM (#45871856)

It’s only fraud if they sold you or marketed to you on those specs. But at least for things like reflashing your router, short of a few explicit opener vendors (like glinet) and Linksys AFTER releasing the WRTGL version, router manufacturers aren’t usually advertising on how much ram or flash memory space they have, any more than car manufacturers are advertising how much flash memory is in their ECUs. It’s not an intended or marketed purpose, so they’re not going to be changing model numbers just because they made an internal update.

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Re:Drilling Down on Uncle Sam's Proposed TP-Link Ban by Dylan16807 on Sunday November 09, 2025 @10:12PM (#45871964)

Changing the flash in a router is pretty understandable. Changing a router's CPU is going to affect core performance, and so does changing parts in an SSD, and core performance should totally count as being used to sell the product.

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Re:Drilling Down on Uncle Sam's Proposed TP-Link Ban by necovek on Sunday November 09, 2025 @11:27PM (#45872433)

But you can optimize software and use slower hardware to maintain the same performance, as an example.

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Re:Drilling Down on Uncle Sam's Proposed TP-Link Ban by Dylan16807 on Monday November 10, 2025 @01:56AM (#45873169)

In theory. It doesn't happen often past initial launch of a product.

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Re:Drilling Down on Uncle Sam's Proposed TP-Link Ban by necovek on Monday November 10, 2025 @02:44AM (#45873475)

If you can build a plausible case that you did this (eg. simply making your fw image smaller justifies using a smaller eMMC chip), and provide a few benchmarks that demonstrate equivalent performance in those scenarios, you'd be of the hook in any legal mandate to keep the performance the same even if your new hw revision ships with weaker hardware.

This is even a common product development strategy: ship to market asap, optimize the margins later.

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Re:Drilling Down on Uncle Sam's Proposed TP-Link Ban by tpmoney on Tuesday November 11, 2025 @03:22PM (#45892327)

“Core performance” only matters relative to what the company is selling you though. For example let’s say a company sells 2 tiers of switch. One does 10G and the other 1G. For whatever reason when they start selling these, it’s cheapest for them to sell the same internal hardware, but with the internals underclocked in software. Some hardware hackers discover this and start unlocking the 10G capabilities of the 1G units. Later down the road, the company finds a cheaper implementation of hardware for the 1G that still can do 1G but even if up-clocked can now only do 2.5 at best. That’s a change to “core performance” but it’s also not fraud. They didn’t advertise or sell you a “switch that starts at 1G but can be unlocked for 10G”, they sold you a “switch that can do 1G”. As long as that’s what they’re still selling you, everything else is ancillary.

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Re:Drilling Down on Uncle Sam's Proposed TP-Link Ban by Dylan16807 on Tuesday November 11, 2025 @05:32PM (#45893810)

I agree with the upclocking example, but "what the company is selling" goes beyond what's on the box. If the old 1G model can do 500k packets per second, but the new one can only do 200k, that should not qualify for the same model number. There are a lot of situations where that's going to cause real problems on stock settings, after people tested the capabilities and made purchases based on those tests.

I want the most important performance characteristics that would be on a good datasheet to be maintained, even if there is no datasheet.

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