What The FCC Router Ban Means For Broadcasters

The FCC just took a big swing at consumer grade routers, and if you’re running a broadcast facility with a little “good enough” box doing something mission critical, this is your sign to look closer. I walk through what it means when foreign manufactured routers land on the FCC covered list, what’s still unclear for brands that design in the US but build overseas, and why this is less about panic and more about planning for the next failure at the worst possible time. 

From there, we get practical: real world alternatives that don’t require a giant enterprise budget. We talk open source firewall and routing options like pfSense and OPNsense, when a simple PC build can outperform the usual consumer gear, and why keeping a known good backup router can save your whole day. I also share why WireGuard has become a serious remote access tool for stations and how a local MSP can wrap support around open source infrastructure when you don’t have the staff to babysit it. 

We also cover a local ownership win in Brookings, South Dakota, then pivot to a tough FCC inspection story out of New Jersey that shows how tower lights, access, operating power, and EAS failures can stack up fast when resources get stretched. On the engineering front, I break down the FCC’s HD Radio digital power changes including asymmetric sidebands and the easier path to running up to minus 10 dBc for eligible FM stations. Finally, we zoom out to the C band satellite distribution squeeze and why the move to fiber and IP delivery won’t be equally possible for every market, especially rural stations that still lack reliable options. 

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Transcript

Affordable Router Alternatives That Work

Local Ownership Win In South Dakota

FCC Inspection Horror Story Lessons

HD Radio Power Rule Changes

C Band Squeeze And Uneven Impact

Practical Next Steps And Sign Off

Tyler 0:01

The uh the FCC just banned consumer grade routers. Not just the cheap, sketchy ones you find on Amazon, not just the brand that's been in the news for all the wrong reasons, new consumer grade routers manufactured outside of the United States, which if you've looked on the back of any of them, it's pretty much all of them. And if you're running a broadcast facility and you've got one of those little TP links or a net gate doing something really important somewhere in the building, I'd probably pay attention to this one. This is the Tyler Woodward project. Today I'm talking about the router band and what you can do about it. A local ownership win out of South Dakota, a New Jersey AM station getting a very uncomfortable letter from the FCC, the HD radio digital power changes that are worth knowing about, and why the C band situation is going to hurt a lot of stations a lot more than others. We got a full plate. Let's get into it. Okay, so the FCC added consumer grade foreign manufactured routers to what's called the quote-unquote covered list. That's their running list of telecom equipment that's been flagged as a national security risk. Their reasoning is, well, that foreign adversaries have been using compromised consumer routers as a way into U.S. networks. And the FCC decided the right move was to cut off the supply of any new equipment. If it's already in your rack, it's already in your building, it's not going to go anywhere. Your grandfather didn't. But new models where any significant part of the production process happened outside of the the uh United States, it now needs government approval before they can be sold here. That part it's still a little murky to me because brands like you know, Ubiquity and Cisco, they're American companies, but they manufacture overseas. So does this catch them in this mess too? Honestly, that's still getting sorted out. Manufacturers are trying to figure out their path forward, and the fine print is still being read by a lot of lawyers right now, which is kind of the uh the standard for this sort of thing. If your station is running on proper enterprise gear, you know, think Fortinet, Juniper, Palo Alto, whatever your IT team chose when someone had an actual budget, you're probably okay. That sort of stuff isn't what this band is aimed at, anyways. But if you're a smaller station or even a medium market station that's been patching things together for years because the budget never quite lined up with the need, this is the moment to look at what you've actually got going and decide if it's something you want to keep depending on. Here's the thing there are real options that don't cost a ton of money. At my last gig, we ran PF Sense on an old Dell desktop, just a regular old PC with a decent Intel card. We had five open VPN tunnels on it, I think somewhere up to 13 VLANs snort running for intrusion detection. We had the DHCP, DNS, all the all the uh spiffy features turned on. Oh, a ton of firewall rules, a lot of natting rules. The, you know, and as I mentioned, it was all open VPN too, because WireGuard really wasn't a thing yet. I mean, it was kind of on the radar, but wasn't matured like it is now. And if you've got the option for a WireGuard, WireGuard is now very much a thing, and it's it's pretty good. I use it personally, and if you got the option at your station, I'd I'd use that for your remote staff. It's pretty, it's pretty rock solid. And then speaking of rock solid, pfSense itself was rock solid. Now, when we eventually had the budget to get a NetGate appliance, which is all it really is, is a purpose-built piece of equipment, an actual, I guess it's sort of enterprise router level that came with PF Sense Plus on it and had actual support behind it. We still kept the old Dell around because it was still solid. It was just on the older side and you know, it needed to be phased out, but we kept it as a backup because the thing still ran. And if something goes wrong at midnight and you need to swamp in a known good router, the ugly old box is suddenly it becomes the most important thing in that building. Another option you can look at is uh OpenSense. It's a it's a fork of PF Sense, same general idea, same packages, same features, but in my opinion, the the UI is a lot easier on the eyes. And there's none of the weirdness around PF Sense Plus versus the free community edition. With OpenSense, you're not wondering, you know, what's behind the paywall. It's all there for the taking. You can turn whatever options on and off you want, install whatever packages you want, you know, within reason. You don't want to overload the thing. And if you've got a smaller site or a simpler type of deployment, you know, think of I don't know, a remote site, a transmitter shack, something that just needs basic routing, maybe a Wi-Fi access point, OpenWRT on a Raspberry Pi can absolutely do the job. Not everything needs to be a big old project. And my my honest opinion on all of this is the one thing you gotta watch out for is you own it. There's no support. When something breaks at a bad time, probably during the morning show, that's on you or whoever you may have on your staff that handles the networking, which is honestly probably you too. So if your team isn't in a place to support that, look into a local MSP, a managed service provider who can wrap a you know a support contract around open source software or open source infrastructure for probably a lot less than a big vendor wants, anyways. It's an option. The point isn't to try to do everything yourself, the point is to stay on the air. But also, I you know, I want to let you know, you got options. There's plenty of stuff out there. All right, this story's a good one. Connoisseur Media, they picked up a big chunk of uh alpha media stations last year. They're selling their cluster in Brookings, South Dakota, to the people who have actually been running the stations. Five stations in particular. KBRK, KBRK FM, KDBX FM, KJJQ, and KKQQ FM, I think. The buyer is Cami Powers, the market manager who's been running the place, along with her husband Derek, and the business manager Chad Hoagie. They're calling the new company Brookings Radio LLC. I love this because this is how it should work. Local people are buying a local cluster. They know because they've worked there. Not another big media conglomerate. Sorry, iHeart. I'm talking about you. Not another company with, you know, trying to squeeze out every little less cent out of the name or out of the place that they can. It's actual human beings who know the market, they know the advertisers, they know what the community cares about. Connoisseur said Brooks and you know, Brookings didn't fit where they wanted to go after the alpha deal. And that's fine. That's totally cool. When big groups sell off smaller markets, this is the best possible outcome. The stations land with people who actually give a damn. FCC approval, it's pending. And hopefully, you know, they hope to close sometime early um early summer. All I gotta say is good luck to Cammy and her team. I'm rooting for them, man. All right. Now we gotta go from the feel-good story to well, feel uncomfortable story. Radio World covered a story about W I M G, an AM station in E-Wing, New Jersey, that got inspected by the FCC and came away with a with a notice uh a notice of violation. And the list of findings is one of those things that you read and think, how the heck did it get to that point? And honestly, we we probably know. You'll you'll understand what I mean when I rattle off what happened. Tower lighting was at the wrong heights. Obstruction lights weren't working, the licensee had filed a notem with the FAA for the outage, but they never renewed it. And the FCC agent actually had to do it during the inspection. Oof. Brush and vegetation around the towers were thick enough to block access to the tower bases. The station was running at 900 watts daytime instead of its authorized 3200 watts. And the real troubling thing is the EAS equipment it wouldn't even turn on. That's a lot of things to have wrong at the same time. And I want to be clear, I'm not sharing this to pile on to the station. That's they're already having a really rough day. I'm sharing it because a lot of us broadcast engineers know exactly how this happens. It doesn't happen because people are being lazy or or you know don't care. It's it happens because resources are getting stretched. One engineer probably covering too many sites, one owner trying to keep the lights on financially while the lights on the tower start to slip. Parts are on order, it's on the list, it'll get done after the next thing. And the next thing never comes. And then one day the FCC shows up. AM directional arrays are especially unforgiving here. You've got lighting requirements, you've got access requirements, you've got operating parameters that are not suggestions. And the EAS stuff, that's not optional. And the FCC, to their credit, does still show up and look at this stuff in the field. So the takeaway, it's not complicated. Go walk the site, check the lights, make sure the you know the EAS box actually does what it's supposed to do. Look at the logs, make sure you're running those required weekly tests, make sure you're relaying the required monthly test. Confirm you're also running at the right power. Clear the brush, hire a company if you have to. Do the boring stuff be you know before it becomes a federal violation. Because once the feds are involved, the boring stuff is now very expensive. Boring stuff. All right, let me tell you about a rule change that doesn't get enough attention right now. The FCC updated the rules for HD radio digital power. And it's genuinely useful and good news for FM engineers. The big thing is asymmetric sidebands. Your HD uh signal has two digital sidebands, one above your carrier, one below your carrier. Before this rule change, if a neighboring station needed protection on one side of you, you had to pull both sides down to match. Now you can run each uh each uh sideband at a different power level. Protect where you need to protect, push further where you have the room. More coverage, more flexibility, less compromise. The FCC also made it a lot easier to run your digital power up to 10% of your analog power. Minus you know, 10 DBC. That used to need special authorization or an STA. Now it's just a notification. File uh what form is it? Uh 2100 schedule 335-FM. And you're eligible. You're running. You know, assuming the FCC doesn't push back, which at minus 10 DBC they probably won't. One catch though, right now this supplies to stations at 106.9 megahertz and below. If you're at 107.1 or higher, you're still under the old uh framework because of uh concerns about interference near the airb at 108. The NAB is working on that, and it sounds like the rules could expand within the next year or so. But if you're you're already on HD radio and you qualify, this is worth a conversation with uh, you know, your consultant engineer. One form, potentially meaningful, better digital coverage. That's a pretty good deal, right? And this brings me to our last story. Bob Weller at the NAB, who had a really good piece in Radio World that I think is required reading. If you're a broadcast engineer paying attention to where the infrastructure of broadcasting is heading, the C-band situation. Yeah, it's real. There's legislation now. The one big beautiful bill, it required the FCC to auction off at least a hundred megahertz of C-band spectrum by mid-2027. Weller isn't being subtle about it either. If you're still dependent on C-band satellite for distribution, you need to be working on transitioning. Not thinking about it, but actively working on it. Now, the counter argument people make is that IP delivery is better than it's ever been. Sure. And that's true. Fiber infrastructure is better, redundant IP paths are more accessible, managed IP distribution has matured a lot. For a station and a decent sized market with good carrier options. Migrating off a C band and onto fiber-backed IP is a really good option, and probably the right move, anyways. But that's only the story if you actually have fiber available. There are stations still in this country and parts of this country that hadn't got there. The broadband build-outs. The investment, of course, sure, was announced. The press releases went out, it all sounded good, and then the fiber stopped somewhere before it ever got to them. Or they've got one mediocre option in town and nothing that you you would want to trust your your network feed at, especially at six in the morning when something is already on fire. Those stations are going to feel the uh the C band squeeze harder than anyone, I think. They're the ones already running on less, anyways. Less staff, less budget, less infrastructure, redundancy. And they're often the only local media source in their area. When something goes sideways, a storm, an emergency, an event that actually matters to the people in that county, they're the ones who are probably still showing up. The ones that people are counting on. And the conversation about transitioning off of C-BAN tends to be built around the stations that already have good options available to them. Which means the stations that don't are gonna have to make noise if they want, you know, to be part of the conversation and to get this problem solved. Because if you don't speak up, it'll get solved without you. Now here's where I land on all this. The router ban, it's a reason to go look at your infrastructure. I know you probably haven't thought about it in a while, and I don't want you to panic about it, but start thinking about it. There's good open source options out there. There's the NetGate appliances, there's MSPs who can help. Pick your path, start moving, start calling people, get in options, get in pricing. Something that you can throw at the GM and say, hey, I need some help with this. Here's a company that can help, or here's some options that we can get. Maybe a really good PC from Bas Pi that's get an Intel nick. Don't use real tech. Use Intel. Trust me, go look at credit. You'll find out about an Intel nick. And I think you'll be pleasantly surprised. I think you'll be pleasantly surprised. The working cell. And if you're running the name, we're just like this week. And if you're left uh station of the five. Coming up with H D universe. Still need CBM because the fiber light never quite each year market. This has been the wordwork project. Thanks for hanging out. Follow me on Instagram, blue scam. And red at the woodwork.me. Make sure you hit it up and hit up the wordwork down me also. Gotta bring a new website up there, get up the like, leave a check there, leave a comment, subscribe to the newsletter, give it the notifications when the new episodes come in. And if you're listening on the podcast, Spotify, YouTube, or whatever other flavor of podcasting in it, give the show like the review.