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.
Consolidation Friday. On May 16 the FCC approved Verizon's 20 billion dollar acquisition of Frontier Communications, clearing the largest fiber deal in years after Verizon agreed to end its diversity, equity, and inclusion programs, an unprecedented condition that signaled how this FCC will price its approvals. The same day, Charter and Cox announced a 34.5 billion dollar merger to create the country's largest cable operator by footprint, a defensive consolidation aimed squarely at the broadband share being taken by fiber and fixed wireless. And EchoStar formally answered the FCC's review letters, disclosing in securities filings that the inquiry was creating uncertainty around its obligations, the first tremor of the payment standoff to come.
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.