What can we do after “US bans new foreign-made routers”?

On March 23, 2026, Federal Communications Commission (FCC) of the United States announced, “Covered List to Include Foreign-Made Consumer Routers, Prohibiting Approval of New Models”. When a product is in Covered List, it means FCC will not inspect that product. That is, no permission at all from FCC for us to import, sell, or use that product inside the United States. Effectively, the United States bans that product. That is why most press said, “US bans foreign-made routers.”

FACT SHEET: FCC Updates Covered List to Include Foreign-Made Consumer Routers, Prohibiting Approval of New Models

It looked frightening when I first read it. The impacts are not immediate, however.

Jianshan Hill Observation Deck (尖山觀景平台)
overlooking Taipei City, New Taipei City, and Tamsui River of Taiwan.

BGP Millionaire

【 BGP Millionaire】

I used this tool to generate this plot.
Plot Range: 01-Feb-2025 0001 to 30-Apr-2025 0030.

Recently I observed and noticed that, global IPv4 BGP table size has already grown over 1 million entries, around February to April time in this year, 2025.

How do we fix a broken submarine fiber cable?

A submarine cable cutting incident happened recently at the Baltic Sea. Another similar incident also happened north of Taiwan. 

I wanted to know more about how to repair a broken submarine fiber cable. I did my research on the Internet. I summarize my findings and list the key fixing steps below.

1. The submarine cable was working.

Initially, the working submarine cable was below the sea water and above the seabed. The submarine cable follows and fits the terrain of seabed.

2. A fault happens.

Examples of faults are punctured insulation, fiber core breaks, and cable cut.

Faults could be natural factors, such as the aging of cable itself, earthquakes, falling rocks, and shark bites. Faults could also be human factors, such as fishing nets dragging, anchoring hits, and malicious sabotage.

BGP AS-Path Filtering, Demonstration

How many of you are working with BGP in your daily job? Let me know in the comments below this post.

I also created a live demonstration about filtering based on BGP AS-Path with Regular Expressions. I hope it is helpful to you.

Cisco IOS Live demo: Filtering with Regex

I share my technique about how I use Regular Expression (regex) to filter out show commands' output.

How do you like this video? Let me know at the comments area of this post, or on YouTube.

Cool Immersive Cooling

I was so amazed about this cooling technology. It is new to me.

Thinking about liquid cooling for servers and networking devices, coming into my mind are tightly sealed water pipes around the circuit boards. This is different. The circuit board and everything simply immerse in liquid.

Cisco Service Provider Tweet

Breaking 100K Entries is the Global IPv6 BGP Table

This year, 2020, around November I started to see the global IPv6 BGP Table is getting more than 100K entries. Although the number is going above and under 100K from time to time, starting from the end of November I can safely say it is breaking 100K entries right now.

This is an interesting milestone for IPv6. That means a massive majority of people are using IPv6 today. I want to note down this moment. And I want to share 3 of my own observations about the IPv6 BGP table.