The dead zone got a death sentence. The FCC issued its first-ever license for supplemental coverage from space, authorizing SpaceX's Starlink satellites to serve ordinary T-Mobile phones over the carrier's own spectrum, the moment satellite-to-phone service went from experiment to regulated commercial reality. The same day, half a world away, Huawei launched the Mate 70, its first phones running an operating system with no Android ancestry, and by Thursday Australia had passed the world's first law banning under-16s from social media, dropping the age-verification problem into every platform's lap.
The industry got its new referee and lost its biggest pending deal in the same week. Donald Trump named Brendan Carr, the FCC's senior Republican and author of its Project 2025 chapter, as chairman, ending two weeks of speculation and starting the countdown on the Biden-era agenda. By Friday, DirecTV had walked away from its acquisition of Dish after bondholders refused the haircut the deal required, Comcast confirmed it will spin off most of its cable networks into a separate company, and the White House summoned carrier executives to face the Salt Typhoon crisis directly.
The rumor became official. The FBI and CISA jointly confirmed that hackers tied to the Chinese government have compromised networks at multiple U.S. telecom companies, stealing call records and intercepting communications around court-ordered wiretap systems, and by Friday the Wall Street Journal had added T-Mobile to the list of names. Against that backdrop the deal machine kept turning: Frontier shareholders blessed Verizon's $20 billion fiber acquisition, and Charter moved to absorb Liberty Broadband and simplify the ownership of America's second-largest cable company.
America voted, and telecom's regulatory map was redrawn overnight. Donald Trump's November 5 victory put the FCC on course for a Republican majority, revived questions about the BEAD broadband program and spectrum auction authority, and made net neutrality's days visibly numbered. The industry did not wait to digest it: UScellular sold a billion dollars of spectrum to AT&T as its breakup continued, Bell Canada reached across the border with a C$7 billion deal for Ziply Fiber, and Qualcomm closed its fiscal year with proof the handset market is finally growing again.