Last week, thousands of SamKnows routers were bricked after a government program ran its course.
In 2020, as part of a program conducted by the Australian Competition & Consumer Commission (ACCC), the Australian government’s chief competition regulator, thousands of volunteers received routers to help test and report on the typical speed and performance of broadband plans in Australia. (More specifically, the Measuring Broadband Australia (MBA) program targeted fixed-line broadband services provided over the NBN, Australia’s government-owned wholesale open-access broadband network, as well as services delivered over other access networks.)
According to the final report that the ACCC distributed, the routers are whiteboxes that were “supplied by SamKnows” and that “perform tests to measure internet performance using test servers maintained by SamKnows and hosted in Australia.”
Last month, the program concluded, and the ACCC released its final performance report (PDF). Subsequently, the routers used for the program were bricked after June 30.
Ars Technica reviewed a copy of an email that an MBA volunteer received in mid-June informing them that the program would end on June 30, 2026 and further stating:
Service Termination: Your whitebox will be disabled, and your SamKnows One account will be closed.
The email, signed by “The SamKnows Team (part of Cisco),” noted that after June 30, the devices would stop collecting data and that users’ “measurement and registration data will be deleted in accordance with our retention obligations under our end-user license agreement.”
However, as one MBA volunteer pointed out to Ars via email, the routers are still working, making the decision to disable the devices an avoidable e-waste risk.
When asked by Ars, the ACCC didn’t specify the number of SamKnows routers disabled last month. However, in a report about the MBA program released in December 2020 (PDF), the ACCC said it initially expected to release about 4,000 whiteboxes throughout the program’s duration and had distributed “over 2,600″ by December 2020. The report noted that the ACCC retained an “adequate pool of whiteboxes to allow for the expansion of our reporting to cover, for example, emerging [retail service providers] and new speed tier plans.”
Salvageable
The volunteer I emailed with and who asked to remain anonymous due to privacy concerns noted that the whiteboxes run a custom version of OpenWRT, an open source, Linux-based operating system for embedded devices. This means the devices “can easily be reflashed into normal Wi-Fi routers with very decent performance,” they said.
The volunteer added:
I personally reflashed my own device (an operation that requires a soldering iron when you do it without company support), and it is now working great as a Wi-Fi router running OpenWRT. So everything already exists to do this …
Regarding hardware disposal, SamKnows’ email to volunteers reads:
You may unplug your whitebox and we encourage you to dispose of it in an environmentally responsible manner. Free e-waste recycling services can be found at your Local Council & Resource Recovery Centre or your nearest Officeworks, JB Hi-Fi, or Harvey Norman store.
Still, the volunteer I spoke with believes that something better could be done to ensure that thousands of functioning routers don’t become trash.
“It seems a shame to me that these perfectly good devices should all be [disabled] simply because the company can’t be bothered to send out a final firmware update that opens the devices up to end users,” they said.
In a similar study, SamKnows distributed 9,000 routers to volunteers to help test Internet speeds in the US for a report published in 2011. The FCC and SamKnows haven’t publicly stated what happened to those routers.
In an attempt to learn why the routers were disabled, I reached out to SamKnows via the email used to contact MBA program volunteers. Although I received an emailed response saying that my message was “being reviewed,” I never received an answer from SamKnows. I also didn’t receive a response from ThousandEyes, the networking intelligence company that Cisco bought in 2020 and whose website SamKnows.com now redirects to.
When I contacted SamKnows-owner Cisco, a company representative told me, “Per SamKnow’s agreement with the ACCC, all inquiries related to the Measurement Broadband Australia program should be directed to the ACCC.”
It’s unclear whether Cisco had any say in the routers being disabled, even though it may have had the technological capability to help keep them running. Notably, Cisco acquired SamKnows in 2023, six years after the ACCC announced that it would use SamKnows for the MBA program.
I asked the ACCC why the routers were disabled instead of opened up via a final firmware update and for the ACCC’s response to e-waste concerns. A spokesperson sent a statement that didn’t answer those questions and read:
The ACCC delivered the MBA program with SamKnows, its testing provider. The SamKnows “Whitebox” is a dedicated hardware-based device that was provided to a few thousand volunteers accepted into the program. The device was manufactured and supplied by SamKnows and used to measure broadband performance as part of the program. With the conclusion of the Measuring Broadband Australia program, the whiteboxes deployed during the MBA program have been disabled and are no longer operational.
The statement also noted that “volunteers are encouraged to unplug their disabled whitebox and dispose of it in an environmentally responsible manner via free e-waste recycling services.”
The relevant stakeholders appear reluctant to provide a clear explanation of why working routers were bricked when another solution was available. It’s possible that SamKnows/Cisco and/or the ACCC don’t want to be associated with future potential issues or concerns about the routers should the devices be updated for easy, continued use. On the other hand, some tinkerers have already shared details on how to keep the disabled routers working.
