The Federal Communications Commission prohibited the continued importation and marketing of previously authorized equipment from Huawei, ZTE, Hytera, Hikvision, and Dahua on June 26, 2026, closing a nearly four-year window in which older, pre-approved models from Covered List companies could keep entering the United States legally.

The decision does not touch drones. DJI and Autel Robotics hardware sits exactly where it did last week: new models blocked, previously authorized models still legal to buy and fly. But this order matters to drone pilots more than its telecom framing suggests, because the legal machinery the FCC just used for the first time is the same machinery that hangs over every grandfathered DJI drone in America.

I have tracked every Covered List public notice since the FCC added all foreign-made drones on December 22, 2025, and two days after that decision I warned that the agency could close the grandfathering loophole whenever it chose. On June 26, it showed exactly how that happens.

FCC Ends The Legacy Equipment Loophole After Four Years

The June 26 Public Notice bars the import and marketing of covered communications equipment that received FCC authorization before 2022 and was added to the Covered List in 2024 or earlier, a category built around telecom and surveillance hardware from Huawei, ZTE, Hytera, Hikvision, and Dahua.

The gap dates to November 2022, when the FCC stopped approving new models from these five companies but left earlier authorizations intact. Anything approved before the cutoff could still be shipped into the country and sold. Security researchers spent years pointing out that the older hardware shares many of the same weaknesses as the banned newer models, including hardcoded credentials and insecure update mechanisms. The June order ends the flow.

Reuters reported the expanded prohibition takes effect in July. Equipment already installed in American homes and networks can keep operating, and the FCC is not ordering anyone to rip out deployed hardware. Products carrying Kaspersky software, added to the list in July 2024, fall inside the cutoff as well, according to reporting from GBHackers.

An October 2025 Rule Built The Cutoff Machinery

The legal tool behind the June decision comes from the FCC’s October 2025 equipment authorization order, which lets the agency limit a previously granted authorization so a device can no longer be imported or marketed, while the authorization itself survives and hardware already in American hands keeps working.

The FCC’s own compliance guide describes the power plainly: the Commission can “prohibit future importation and marketing of such equipment without revoking the underlying authorization.” The procedure, codified at 47 CFR § 2.939(e), requires only a public notice with at least 30 days for comment, plus a public interest finding. That is not a high bar.

The Huawei round shows the timeline. The Public Safety and Homeland Security Bureau opened the proceeding on March 27, 2026 with Public Notice DA 26-294. Comments closed May 6. The prohibition landed June 26. Start to finish, three months.

Drone Makers Escaped This Round On A Technicality Of Timing

The cutoff spares DJI and Autel Robotics, along with every other foreign drone maker, for one reason: the FCC limited this action to equipment added to the Covered List in 2024 or earlier, and foreign drones did not join the list until December 22, 2025.

The same timing shields TP-Link and other foreign-made consumer routers, added on March 23, 2026. When the FCC swept every foreign-made drone onto the Covered List in December, it assured pilots that previously authorized models could still be imported and sold, and that nothing changed for drones already in the field. That assurance still holds. The agency has since layered on softening measures: a firmware update waiver now extended to January 2029, a narrow toy drone carve-out, and a conditional approval pathway that had cleared eleven manufacturers through early June, none of them Chinese.

But the March notice that started the legacy equipment proceeding contained a qualifier worth rereading. It stated that the prohibition would not currently apply to equipment added to the list after 2024, a limit communications lawyers at Pillsbury flagged in their client alert. A scope drawn with the word currently is a scope that can move.

DroneXL’s Take

Two days after the drone ban landed, I wrote that the FCC could close the grandfathering loophole for specific models anytime it wanted. Six months later, the agency ran that exact play against Huawei and Hikvision. The trade press is treating June 26 as a telecom story. I read it as a live-fire demonstration of the tool that determines whether Americans can keep buying the drones they already rely on.

Nothing in the rules fixes the 2024-or-earlier line in place. It is a scope choice, and scope choices move. Extending the cutoff to the December 2025 drone addition takes one public notice and a 30-day comment window, nothing more. That is the entire distance between today’s reassurances and a market where retailers can no longer restock a DJI Air 3S or Mini 5 Pro. Anyone who believes the current grandfathering is permanent is betting on the restraint of an agency that banned new DJI models by skipping the audit Congress gave it a year to perform.

My position hasn’t changed since December: this structure hurts American operators more than it hurts the Chinese manufacturers it targets. Huawei will survive losing its legacy US telecom sales. The volunteer search and rescue team flying a five-year-old Mavic will feel a battery supply cutoff far more sharply. Protectionism dressed up as security always lands hardest on the people it claims to protect.

Watch the end of this year. The eleven UAS conditional approvals granted through early June all terminate on December 31, 2026, and the Blue UAS carve-out lapses one day later. DJI’s Ninth Circuit petition, Case 26-1029, hangs over all of it. That cluster of expirations is when the FCC decides whether the Covered List settles into a stable regime or ratchets tighter, and June 26 tells you which way this agency likes to turn the ratchet. I said it in December and I’ll say it again: buy your spare batteries while you still can.

Sources: Federal Communications Commission, Cybersecurity News, Reuters via TechStory, Pillsbury Winthrop Shaw Pittman.

DroneXL uses automated tools to support research and source retrieval. All reporting and editorial perspectives are by Haye Kesteloo.