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by Miraste 81 days ago
It would take years, maybe decades. We saw the same thing with drones. It's impossible to overstate how much the supply chain for modern electronics depends on China. Everything in a router, from the chips to the resistors to the antennae to the coating on the PCBs, comes from there.If you wanted to build it all in America, even if you had unlimited funding it would take forever.

There's no router industry here because there's (mostly) no electronics industry, and to make one you'd need to build all the supply chains and subsidiary industries from scratch.
1 comments
groundzeros2015 80 days ago
You’re just saying it’s painful and don’t want to do it which is the purpose of the law.
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Miraste 80 days ago
I'm saying that if you wanted a fully made-in-America WiFi 8 router, it is impossible, it physically can't happen. The timescale required to spin all of this up is too long, even with perfect funding and organization.

I'm also saying that because in reality there is no funding for it, American routers will end up like the US shipbuilding industry, using protectionist policies as an excuse to stay decades behind the times and produce nothing.

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groundzeros2015 80 days ago
> it is impossible, it physically can't happen.

I don’t think that’s true.

> American routers will end up like the US shipbuilding industry, using protectionist policies as an excuse to stay decades behind the times

I agree.

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Miraste 80 days ago
I can't change what you believe, but as far as I understand the American manufacturing industry, there is zero chance they could build a WiFi 8 router in the time period where it's the current standard. Not low, zero.

This article is a good example: https://archive.is/RAZMJ

Apple, with all their resources, couldn’t even get American screws. Now, if they really wanted to, they could have spun up their own screw manufacturing, eventually. But for a router, you need a lot more than screws. Resistors, capacitors, PCBs, plastics, all the secondary and tertiary industries for the materials behind those--it would probably take decades and trillions of dollars.

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