Week of April 7–12, 2025Telecom Intelligence: Week of April 7, 2025
Tariff week hit the phone in your pocket. The week opened with lines at Apple Stores as customers rushed to buy iPhones ahead of feared price hikes from the new reciprocal tariffs on Chinese imports, a rare moment of consumer panic buying in the device market. It closed with whiplash: late on April 11 the administration exempted smartphones, laptops, and chips from the steepest reciprocal tariffs, sparing the device supply chain, at least temporarily, from levies that could have added hundreds of dollars to flagship phones. In the background, EchoStar and SpaceX escalated their fight over the 2 GHz band at the FCC, with EchoStar blasting SpaceX's spectrum-sharing push as an anticompetitive attempt to crush its hybrid network before it matures.