FAA Administrator Bryan Bedford has said on the record that the FAA is replacing Cisco 600 routers, the hardware anonymous sources told CBS News was behind the nationwide ground stop. He did not confirm that a Cisco 600 was the router that failed.
Speaking at a press conference on Saturday 14 November, Bedford said, according to CNBC:
"We are constantly replacing 2,000, you know, Cisco 600 routers with Juniper routers, right? So this is ordinary course of business stuff."
He said the replacement is not part of the FAA's $12.5bn modernisation effort, and that the root cause is unknown. "What we saw was instability. We couldn't explain the instability," he said.
Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said the FAA will work with AT&T, Verizon and Lumen on a new network architecture, Fox Business reports. "Until I can build [the new architecture], I'm stuck with L3Harris, who owns this network," he said, via CNBC.
L3Harris said on X that, with other tech companies, it has completed more than 70% of the planned copper-to-fibre conversion of airspace communications.
Bedford's comments confirm that Cisco 600 routers are in the network and being phased out. They do not confirm the CBS account that the fault lay with those routers, so that claim remains unverified.