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.
The satellite layer of the US network got its commercial charter this week. On December 16 the FCC granted SpaceX and T-Mobile a landmark supplemental coverage from space license, moving direct-to-cell service from experimental authority to a fully commercial framework. The same day, Verizon and Array Digital Infrastructure announced a multi-year partnership giving Verizon streamlined access to Array's portfolio of more than 4,400 towers to accelerate its 5G buildout. And on December 18 the FCC held its final open meeting of the year, adopting a Third Report and Order that tightens VoIP providers' access to phone numbers in its campaign against robocalls, and deleting around 35 obsolete rules from the books.
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.