Last week, thousands of SamKnows routers were blocked after a government program ran its course.
In 2020, as part of a program run by the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC), the Australian government’s main competition regulator, thousands of volunteers were provided with routers to help test and report on the typical speed and performance of broadband plans in Australia. (More specifically, the Measuring broadband in Australia (MBA) focused on fixed-line broadband services provided over the NBN, Australia’s government-owned wholesale open access broadband network, as well as services provided over other access networks).
According to the final report distributed by the ACCC, the routers are white boxes 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 published its final performance report. (PDF). Routers used for the program were subsequently blocked after June 30.
Ars Technica reviewed a copy of an email an MBA volunteer received in mid-June informing him that the program would end on June 30, 2026, and further stated:
Termination of service: 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 “user measurement and logging 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 did not specify the number of SamKnows routers disabled last month. However, in a report on the MBA program published in December 2020 (PDF)the ACCC said it initially expected to publish around 4,000 white boxes over the duration of the program and had distributed “more than 2,600” by December 2020. The report noted that the ACCC retained an “adequate pool of white boxes to enable the expansion of our reporting to cover, for example, emerging schemes (retail service providers) and new speed tiers”.
