Australia’s competition regulator has ended a national broadband testing program by disabling the SamKnows routers it had placed in volunteers’ homes, leaving a few thousand purpose-built boxes headed for recycling unless owners are willing to hack them back into service.
The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission used the devices for its Measuring Broadband Australia program, which tracked the performance of fixed-line broadband services over the National Broadband Network and other access networks. According to the ACCC’s final report, the whiteboxes were supplied by SamKnows and ran performance tests against SamKnows test servers hosted in Australia.
The program ended on June 30, 2026. Ars Technica reported that an email sent to one volunteer in mid-June, signed by “The SamKnows Team (part of Cisco),” said the user’s whitebox would be disabled and the associated SamKnows One account would be closed. The same email said the boxes would stop collecting data after June 30 and that measurement and registration data would be deleted under SamKnows’ retention obligations.
The ACCC did not tell Ars how many units were disabled. In a December 2020 report, the regulator said it expected to deploy about 4,000 whiteboxes over the life of the program and had already distributed more than 2,600 by that point. In its latest statement to Ars, the ACCC described the deployed fleet as “a few thousand” devices.
Reusable hardware, awkwardly locked down
One Measuring Broadband Australia volunteer told Ars that the SamKnows units use a custom version of OpenWRT, the Linux-based router operating system. OpenWRT’s hardware page for the SamKnows SK-WB8 says the device can run that firmware, and the volunteer said the boxes can be converted into ordinary Wi-Fi routers with solid performance.
That reuse path is not a friendly one for ordinary participants. The volunteer said they reflashed their own unit and now use it as an OpenWRT router, but doing so without vendor support required a soldering iron. Their complaint is less that the box is impossible to save than that SamKnows or Cisco could have made saving it boring, for example with a final firmware update that opened the hardware for normal use.
SamKnows’ email instead told volunteers they could unplug the whitebox and dispose of it through free e-waste services at local council and resource recovery centres, Officeworks, JB Hi-Fi, or Harvey Norman stores, according to Ars.
Asked why the devices were disabled rather than unlocked, the ACCC did not answer that question directly. A spokesperson told Ars that SamKnows manufactured and supplied the whiteboxes, that the devices were used to measure broadband performance during the program, and that, with the program concluded, the deployed boxes “have been disabled and are no longer operational.” The spokesperson also said volunteers were encouraged to use e-waste recycling services.
SamKnows did not provide Ars with an explanation after acknowledging the inquiry. ThousandEyes, the Cisco-owned network intelligence company whose site SamKnows.com now redirects to, also did not respond, according to Ars. Cisco told Ars that questions about Measuring Broadband Australia should go to the ACCC under SamKnows’ agreement with the regulator.
Cisco bought SamKnows in 2023, years after the ACCC selected the company for the broadband program. The available statements do not establish whether Cisco had any role in the decision to disable the boxes, even though SamKnows’ software and accounts were central to how they operated.
This story draws on original reporting from Ars Technica.
