Asus received a slap on the wrists from the FCC back in 2015 for 'cheating'. For that, the fine was only for $240,000, which I doubt they even noticed, and a three year compliance agreement.
When were they fined/punished for the second time? Google 'asus fined' doesn't turn up anything obvious. Honestly interested as you seem to mention this every time Asus crops up.
I'd agree that the DSL-AC68U was a bit of a trainwreck. I'm not aware of any of their other routers having problems to anywhere near the same extent.
At least someone notices. If a company makes crap products and fails to make even the most basic effort to resolve known issues, I believe in calling them out and buying products from OEM’s who make reasonable efforts to update glaring security holes (ASUS BIOS update fiasco recent enough for you? They failed to notice they were effectively distributing malware for at least 5 months
https://www.digitaltrends.com/computing/asus-malware-attack/ ). If people still want to buy that brand fully aware of the history then that’s up to them.
It wasn’t just the DSL-AC68 that used the MediaTek chipset, the previous N range did as well, same issues plagued it, they are well known for an issue where one or more of the switch ports fails, sound familiar?
The security audit judgement:
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/02/23/asus_router_flaws_settlement/
https://www.ftc.gov/system/files/documents/cases/160222asusagree.pdf
The settlement on the FCC faked reports:
https://www.fcc.gov/document/asustek-pay-240k-resolve-equipment-marketing-investigations
Firstly every networking kit provider has issues, that’s to be expected, what’s normal (as you know) is that updates flow quickly and resolve the issues, ideally prior to public disclosure or as soon as reasonably possible following. ASUS don’t do that, it’s not normal to leave known security holes unpatched on current gen products for years, they weren’t obscure, this is fundamentally basic stuff. The only time it does choose to patch, is when a large retail partner threatens to pull its distribution, it then only really cares when it’s forced agree to pay to be audited for the next two decades - i’m not aware of any other networking OEM who’s had a similar outcome over two decades, ever.
The link in my first post above details the MediaTek modem issues, funny thing is other OEM’s used the same chipset, but managed to fix the issues relatively quickly, ASUS said they would, strung people along for years, then didn’t. Oh and faking FCC certification data is just lazy. Combine this with the well documented RMA fiasco’s for everything they sell and I have to ask, would you really choose to have an ASUS router keeping your data safe?
