Year-end week delivered a victory lap, a rocket launch, and a regulator's scorecard. T-Mobile published its Un-carrier Unwrapped retrospective on December 22, claiming America's best network title, its strongest quarter in over a decade, and 90 million T-Life installs under new CEO Srini Gopalan. On December 23, AST SpaceMobile launched BlueBird 6 from India, a roughly 2,400 square foot phased array three times larger than its first-generation satellites and the largest commercial communications array ever sent to low Earth orbit. The same day, FCC Chairman Brendan Carr published a list of 75 wins delivered in 2025, confirming among them new frameworks allowing satellite operators to run direct-to-cell services at higher power levels.
The MVNO model got its most famous customer yet this week. On June 16 the Trump Organization unveiled Trump Mobile, a branded wireless service riding the big three networks as an MVNO, complete with a 47.45 dollar monthly plan and a promised gold-colored phone, instantly making brand-driven wireless a national conversation. The same day, Charlie Ergen finally got his meeting with FCC Chairman Brendan Carr, where EchoStar reiterated that undermining its licenses would be illegal and pressed for a resolution to the review that has frozen its finances. And on Capitol Hill, the Senate Commerce Committee rallied support for an 800 megahertz spectrum pipeline in the budget reconciliation bill, setting up July's restoration of FCC auction authority.
Apple redrew its interface and EchoStar escalated to the Oval Office this week. At WWDC on June 9, Apple unveiled iOS 26 with its Liquid Glass design language, the deepest visual overhaul of the iPhone in over a decade, alongside expanded Apple Intelligence features and eSIM-forward platform changes. Two days later, EchoStar chairman Charlie Ergen took his FCC standoff to the top, meeting President Trump on June 12, with FCC Chairman Brendan Carr joining by phone, as the company sought relief from the spectrum review that has frozen its finances. Around the meeting, a broad coalition of industry stakeholders warned the FCC that unwinding EchoStar's licenses would chill investment across the entire spectrum market.
The week the EchoStar saga truly began. On May 9, FCC Chairman Brendan Carr sent letters to EchoStar opening reviews of both its 5G buildout compliance and its mobile satellite spectrum rights in the 2 GHz band, following months of SpaceX filings arguing the spectrum sits underused. The letters landed on the same day EchoStar reported first-quarter results showing widening losses and continuing subscriber declines at Boost Mobile, a collision of regulatory and financial pressure that would define the company's entire year. The week opened with a quieter milestone: Microsoft retired Skype on May 5 after 23 years, closing the chapter on the service that first taught the world to route calls over the internet.
The FCC's math changed on March 18. Democratic Commissioner Geoffrey Starks announced he would resign in the spring, a departure that would hand Chairman Carr a working Republican majority months before a new commissioner could be confirmed, easing the path for everything from deregulation to merger conditions. The same day produced the year's biggest security deal, with Google agreeing to acquire cloud security firm Wiz for 32 billion dollars, the largest acquisition in Google's history and a signal of how seriously the cloud giants are arming up as infrastructure attacks like Salt Typhoon reshape enterprise demand. The week also delivered MWC's considered verdict, as analyst retrospectives separated Barcelona's durable signals, satellite, AI-RAN economics, open networks, from its considerable noise.
Deregulation got a battle cry. On March 12 FCC Chairman Brendan Carr opened a docket bluntly titled Delete, Delete, Delete, inviting the public to nominate any Commission rule for elimination and signaling the most aggressive deregulatory push in the agency's modern history. The market week belonged to Verizon's candor: at a March 11 investor conference the carrier warned that first-quarter subscriber growth would be soft amid a brutal promotional environment, knocking its shares down more than 7 percent and dragging the whole telecom sector with them. And Crown Castle completed its retreat to a pure tower company, agreeing March 13 to sell its fiber and small cells businesses to Zayo and EQT for a combined 8.5 billion dollars.
Power changed hands, and telecom's referee changed with it. President Trump was inaugurated January 20 and designated Brendan Carr chairman of the FCC the same day, installing a chairman with a published agenda: aggressive spectrum revival, satellite acceleration, deregulation, and a combative posture toward Big Tech. Among the first executive orders was a 75-day enforcement pause that brought TikTok flickering back to life, deferring rather than resolving the divest-or-ban standoff. The new administration's industrial ambitions arrived a day later at the White House, where OpenAI, Oracle, and SoftBank announced Stargate, a plan to spend up to 500 billion dollars on US AI data centers, a number that would reshape demand for power, fiber, and land before a single model trains.
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.