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.
An era ended on a Friday. On August 1 T-Mobile completed its 4.4 billion dollar acquisition of UScellular's wireless operations and select spectrum, absorbing the last major regional carrier's customers and stores while UScellular lives on as a tower and spectrum company. The close came one week after the FCC's July 24 open meeting, where commissioners unanimously adopted a rulemaking to accelerate the retirement of copper networks, formally starting the countdown on the century-old phone plant. And AT&T's Internet Air fixed wireless service posted another 200,000-plus customer quarter, evidence that even the carrier most committed to fiber keeps finding demand for wireless broadband it once dismissed.
December opened with the quiet part said out loud: Chinese state hackers had burrowed into at least eight US telecom providers, and the government's advice to Americans was to encrypt their way around the phone network. The FCC answered within a day, moving to turn a 30-year-old wiretap statute into a cybersecurity mandate for carriers. Away from the breach, AT&T used its first analyst day in years to commit to 50 million fiber locations and a copper farewell by 2029, Britain's competition regulator blessed the 15 billion pound Vodafone-Three merger with MVNO protections attached, and eSIM Go teamed with Vodafone UK to sell the MVNO model itself as a boxed product.