The year changed and so did two decades of regulatory architecture. On January 2 the Sixth Circuit struck down the FCC's net neutrality rules outright, ruling in the first major post-Chevron test that the agency never had the authority to classify broadband as a telecom service, and ending a twenty-year seesaw unless Congress writes it into law. Days earlier, AT&T, Verizon, and Lumen declared their networks clear of Salt Typhoon, statements that landed awkwardly against a White House count that was still climbing. And Vodafone closed the books on its European retreat, completing the 8 billion euro sale of Vodafone Italia to Swisscom on New Year's Eve.
Christmas week delivered a signed law, a longer casualty list, and a stress test nobody framed as one. President Biden signed the 895 billion dollar defense bill on December 23, finally funding the 3 billion dollar rip-and-replace program and setting the spectrum studies that feed the next auction pipeline. Four days later the White House confirmed a ninth US telecom had fallen to Salt Typhoon, attributing the breadth of the compromise to plainly inadequate carrier security. And on Christmas Day, 65 million Americans watched NFL football over Netflix instead of broadcast towers, the largest live sports streaming audience on record and a quiet referendum on whether the nation's broadband was ready for appointment television.
The satellite era got a signup page. T-Mobile opened beta registration for its Starlink direct-to-cell service on December 16, inviting ordinary customers to test satellite texting on the phones already in their pockets, while the same day in Brussels the SpaceRISE consortium signed the 10.6 billion euro concession to build IRIS2, Europe's sovereign answer to the constellations it does not control. Two days later CISA told the government's most targeted people to stop trusting carrier voice and SMS altogether and move to end-to-end encrypted apps, the bluntest official verdict yet on the Salt Typhoon aftermath. And SoftBank's Masayoshi Son stood next to the president-elect and pledged 100 billion dollars for American AI infrastructure, the kind of number that eventually lands on networks.
Washington compressed a month of telecom policy into a single Wednesday. On December 11 the Senate Commerce Committee put the Salt Typhoon breach on the public record, with witnesses telling senators that the 3 billion dollars finally headed to the rip-and-replace program was a good start and not a finish. The same day, the FCC voted to open all 1,200 megahertz of the 6 gigahertz band to very low power devices, seeding the next generation of wearables and augmented-reality hardware with unlicensed spectrum. And across the Capitol, the House passed the 895 billion dollar defense bill carrying that rip-and-replace money plus the spectrum studies that will shape the next decade of mid-band auctions.
December opened with the quiet part said out loud: Chinese state hackers had burrowed into at least eight US telecom providers, and the government's advice to Americans was to encrypt their way around the phone network. The FCC answered within a day, moving to turn a 30-year-old wiretap statute into a cybersecurity mandate for carriers. Away from the breach, AT&T used its first analyst day in years to commit to 50 million fiber locations and a copper farewell by 2029, Britain's competition regulator blessed the 15 billion pound Vodafone-Three merger with MVNO protections attached, and eSIM Go teamed with Vodafone UK to sell the MVNO model itself as a boxed product.