March closed with money and spectrum moving toward the next platforms. Bharti Airtel announced a $1 billion investment round in its Nxtra data center arm led by Alpha Wave Global with Carlyle and Anchorage participating, valuing the business around $3.1 billion and aiming the proceeds squarely at AI-driven capacity across India. The FCC, one week after its copper order, opened a proposed rulemaking on spectrum for emerging space operations, from orbital transfer vehicles to lunar relays, including possible space-to-ground use of the 2320 to 2345 MHz band. And the GSA published its State of the Market report on April 2, giving the industry its scorecard on global 5G deployment as attention shifts to 5G Advanced and early 6G positioning.
The FCC owned this week. On Monday it added foreign-produced consumer routers to the Covered List, effective immediately, citing a national security determination that linked foreign router supply chains to the Volt Typhoon and Salt Typhoon intrusion campaigns. On Thursday the commission unanimously adopted its Network and Services Modernization Order, sweeping away the federal approval process for retiring copper networks, granting blanket authority to grandfather legacy services, and preempting conflicting state requirements. Between those two actions, the agency also kept the AWS-3 auction on schedule, releasing the application status for Auction 113 ahead of June bidding. One week, three moves, and each one redraws a boundary: what equipment can be sold, what networks must be maintained, and who gets new spectrum.
A consolidation and infrastructure week. Comcast began lab and field trials of an AI edge platform built on Nvidia GPUs across its roughly 200 edge compute locations, with Charter announcing a similar partnership, a sign the cable industry intends to monetize its physical footprint for AI workloads, not just broadband. New York regulators conditionally approved the Charter and Cox transaction on March 20, leaving California as the last state standing between the companies and a combination that would create the country's largest ISP. And the FCC marked one year of its Council on National Security while granting GCI a waiver tied to replacing covered equipment in Alaska, a reminder that the security review machinery is now a permanent feature of US telecom policy.
The week after Barcelona was about turning announcements into shelf space. AT&T rebuilt its consumer rate card around three new Unlimited Your Way plans, adding an entry-level Value 2.0 tier and letting customers mix and match plans across lines, a direct response to complexity fatigue and a shot at T-Mobile's more rigid lineup. The iPhone 17e hit stores on March 11 and the carriers immediately discounted it to nearly free, confirming that the value segment is where the subscriber fight is happening. In the machine-to-machine world, Verifone announced it will use Thales eSIM technology and the GSMA's SGP.32 standard to manage connectivity across its global payment terminal fleet, one of the first large commercial commitments to the new remote provisioning standard.
Mobile World Congress in Barcelona set the agenda for the entire month, and the loudest story on the keynote stage was not a carrier. SpaceX rebranded its direct-to-cell service as Starlink Mobile, disclosed 10 million monthly active users, and set a target of 25 million by the end of the year. Three days later, T-Mobile's CEO publicly rejected the idea of hosting a Starlink MVNO on his network, which tells you the carriers understood exactly what the rebrand meant. Meanwhile EchoStar closed the book on its fourth-carrier ambitions, reporting year-end results as a self-described hybrid operator that sells spectrum and rides on AT&T's network. On the MVNO side, Juniper Research sized the global market at $54 billion by 2030, and a four-company consortium launched at MWC to industrialize how new MVNOs get to market. Apple rounded out the week with the iPhone 17e, putting Globalstar-powered satellite messaging in a $599 phone.