Telit Cinterion, one of the few large Western makers of cellular IoT modules, will start producing modules in the US in October. The company announced on 2 September that an 8,000 square foot facility in Bristol, Pennsylvania, will handle manufacturing, testing and quality assurance for its 4G and 5G modules, as well as routers and gateways it builds for customers.
Local electronics firm MFG Innovations will provide the assembly capability, while Telit Cinterion keeps control of the products, specifications and customer relationships. The company expects the first phase to create at least 50 jobs, with engineering and supply chain support from the company’s existing US offices in North Carolina and Florida.
It is a small plant by electronics standards, and its significance lies less in its size than in who is building it, and why now.
Why A Western Module Maker Is Coming Home
The timing lines up with a US rulebook that is steadily closing around Chinese modules. Cellular modules are the small radio components inside meters, trackers, cameras, cars and industrial equipment that connect them to mobile networks, and Chinese suppliers ship most of them.
In January 2025 the Pentagon added Quectel, the world’s largest module maker, to its list of Chinese military companies, a designation Quectel rejects and says is “not a sanctions list”. The label still carries weight: a 2024 defence law has barred the Department of Defense from buying directly from listed companies since 30 June this year, and the restriction extends to contractors’ products from June 2027, according to an analysis by WireScreen.
The FCC has also moved, adopting rules in October 2025 that stop it from approving modules from companies on its national security list, or devices that contain them, although WireScreen notes the FCC had not actually added any module maker to that list at the time of its briefing.
The worry behind these rules is less about the hardware than about access. A module runs its own firmware and can receive remote updates, so critics such as the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a Washington think tank, argue that modules from state-backed suppliers inside ports, power grids and hospitals create a path for surveillance or sabotage. Its April memo urged Congress to bar Chinese modules from defence purchases and the FCC to add their makers to its security list, recommendations that neither Congress nor the FCC has yet adopted.
For buyers in defence, government and critical infrastructure, that adds up to a strong reason to know exactly where each part comes from. “The Bristol facility represents an important step in strengthening trusted technology supply chains,” said Telit Cinterion chief executive Paolo Dal Pino.
How Lopsided The Market Is
The scale of the challenge is hard to overstate: Counterpoint found Quectel alone took 41 percent of shipments in the second quarter of 2026, and as we covered in why Cat 1 bis won, the five largest module suppliers by shipments in the first half of the year were all Chinese.
WireScreen estimates Chinese makers account for about 71 percent of global units, while US-based suppliers hold roughly 10 percent between them, and it says Chinese modules often sell for 30 to 50 percent less than Western equivalents.
The Western field has also thinned, as Swiss firm u-blox left the cellular module business in 2025, and Semtech has agreed to sell its modules business to Taiwan’s Compal. That leaves Telit Cinterion as one of the most visible Western names, and Counterpoint recently called it the leading international vendor outside China, with double-digit growth driven by Europe and North America.
Who Telit Cinterion Is
That position is partly the result of a merger, because Telit, which traces its roots to Trieste, Italy, bought the cellular IoT business of French defence and electronics group Thales in 2023, combining it with Thales’ long-established Cinterion brand to form Telit Cinterion, which it pitched at the time as the leading Western IoT provider.
Being Western is now central to its sales pitch, and a US factory makes that claim concrete. Dal Pino described Bristol as “the first phase of Telit Cinterion’s long-term commitment to expanding domestic capabilities,” and the company says domestic production will improve traceability and supply chain transparency in line with US and Western regulations.
Put simply, the plant is less about volume than about eligibility. Eight thousand square feet will not challenge Chinese output, but a US-built module can win contracts that a cheaper imported part cannot even bid for, and those contracts tend to be long-lived.
Quectel Has Its Own US Answer
Telit Cinterion is not the only company trying to make modules on American soil. In late 2024, a newly funded Ohio start-up, Eagle Electronics, licensed Quectel’s technology to build modules in Solon, Ohio, with firmware compiled domestically, though WireScreen notes the designs remain under Quectel’s control.
The two approaches show where the argument is heading: one puts a Western company’s own designs into a US plant; the other puts a Chinese company’s designs into American hands for assembly and software builds. Buyers and regulators will have to decide whether the place a module comes off the line matters as much as who designed it.
What It Means For Device Makers
For most commercial IoT makers, price will still decide, and Chinese modules will stay cheaper. But companies selling into US government agencies, defence contractors, utilities and other critical infrastructure now have to plan for the June 2027 contractor rules, and switching a module late in a product’s life means new testing and certification.
That makes the choice of module an early design decision rather than a late purchasing one. Firms building for these markets are now asking suppliers where they assemble modules, where they build firmware and who can push updates to it.
Where Western Modules Go From Here
A single 8,000 square foot plant will not shift the global module market, and Telit Cinterion does not claim it will. What the plant does give the company is something few rivals can offer: modules that a Western firm designed and a US factory built, just as the Pentagon’s contractor rules approach in June 2027.
Whether that becomes a real alternative for mainstream IoT depends on two things outside Telit Cinterion’s control: how many buyers will pay a Western premium when nobody forces them to, and how far US rules go in forcing them. If the FCC ever adds Chinese module makers to its security list, Bristol will look less like a niche plant and more like a head start.
