Australia's gov't bricks thousands of functional test routers, raising e-waste concerns
Original: Aussie gov't tells volunteers to throw out thousands of functioning test routers
Why This Matters
The case highlights growing tension between program lifecycle management and e-waste responsibility in government tech deployments.
Australia's ACCC ended its Measuring Broadband Australia program on June 30, 2026, remotely disabling thousands of SamKnows routers distributed to volunteers since 2020. Volunteers were told to dispose of the devices, despite the hardware remaining functional and reflashable with OpenWRT.
In 2020, Australia's competition regulator, the Australian Competition & Consumer Commission (ACCC), launched the Measuring Broadband Australia (MBA) program, distributing SamKnows whitebox routers to thousands of volunteers to monitor fixed-line broadband performance across the NBN and other networks. The program concluded at the end of June 2026, with the ACCC releasing its final performance report. Following the conclusion, SamKnows — now part of Cisco — remotely disabled all participating routers as of June 30, 2026, and closed associated SamKnows One accounts. Volunteers received an email in mid-June notifying them of the service termination and were encouraged to dispose of the devices 'in an environmentally responsible' manner. The ACCC did not specify the total number of disabled routers, but a December 2020 report stated the program planned to distribute approximately 4,000 devices, with over 2,600 already distributed by that point. One anonymous volunteer told Ars Technica that the hardware runs a custom version of OpenWRT and 'can easily be reflashed into normal Wi-Fi routers with very decent performance.' The volunteer confirmed they personally reflashed their own device — a process requiring a soldering iron — and it now functions as a standard Wi-Fi router. Critics have raised concerns that the mass disabling of still-functional hardware represents an avoidable contribution to electronic waste.