A week that ended with a jolt. On Sunday morning, Blue Origin's New Glenn rocket delivered its reusable booster back to a landing ship but left AST SpaceMobile's BlueBird 7 satellite in an orbit too low to save, a costly setback for the company racing to build a direct-to-device constellation. Earlier in the week, Ericsson opened the network equipment earnings season with results that showed currency headwinds masking real underlying growth, and the FCC's Public Safety and Homeland Security Bureau refreshed the Covered List, the government's roster of communications equipment deemed a national security risk. Space ambition, vendor economics, and security policy all in one week, which is roughly the modern telecom industry in miniature.
A week about the plumbing of the industry rather than its headlines. Juniper Research published new figures showing travel eSIM revenue reaching 1.8 billion dollars in 2025, up 85 percent in a single year, confirming how quickly downloadable SIMs are eating international roaming. On October 14 Ericsson reported third quarter results, with sales down but margins holding as the vendor leaned on major contracts in India, Japan, and the UK. And on October 15 Samsung announced a multi-country deal to deploy virtualized, O-RAN compliant network equipment for Vodafone across Europe, starting in Germany and covering thousands of sites over five years.
The spectrum machine restarted and the AI checkbook opened wider. The FCC circulated its February meeting agenda, teeing up the AWS-3 re-auction and an inquiry into the upper C-band, the first concrete moves toward putting new mid-band spectrum into carrier hands since auction authority lapsed in 2023. Analysts immediately began handicapping the bidder field for what could be the decade's most consequential spectrum sales. Meanwhile earnings season revealed the scale of the AI infrastructure arms race: the tech megacaps collectively guided to more than 320 billion dollars of 2025 capital spending, a number that dwarfs the entire US wireless industry's annual investment and is already reshaping demand for fiber, power, and connectivity.