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 landmark close, a regulatory earthquake in Europe, and the first big vendor scorecard of the year. On January 20, Verizon completed its roughly $20 billion acquisition of Frontier Communications, instantly expanding its fiber reach to nearly 30 million homes and businesses across 31 states. The same day in Brussels, the European Commission published its Cybersecurity Act 2 proposal, which for the first time would give the EU a binding framework to phase out high-risk suppliers from telecom networks and 17 other critical sectors, a move widely read as targeting Huawei and ZTE. And on January 23, Ericsson closed out 2025 with fourth quarter organic sales growth of 6 percent and its strongest margins in years, evidence that network spending has stabilized even as the RAN market stays flat.
A quieter week on the surface, but the signals underneath were about where enterprise connectivity money is flowing. Ericsson told RCR Wireless on December 9 that it now counts private 5G deployments across hundreds of enterprise customers, with roughly 95 percent using capabilities only 5G can deliver, a pointed contrast with rivals retreating from the segment. On December 10, Fierce Network announced the winners of its 2025 Innovation Awards, a useful map of where the industry thinks the next competitive edges sit. And on December 11 the FCC released the tentative agenda for its December 18 open meeting, headlined by a Third Report and Order tightening the rules that give VoIP providers direct access to phone numbers, the agency's latest move against robocall infrastructure.
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.
Consolidation went orbital this week. On July 17 SES completed its 3.1 billion dollar acquisition of Intelsat, uniting two of the oldest names in satellite communications into a multi-orbit operator with roughly 120 satellites. On July 14 the Government Accountability Office renewed public pressure on NTIA over unimplemented spectrum management recommendations, warning that federal coordination gaps are slowing the pipeline that feeds commercial wireless. And Ericsson's second quarter results on July 15 showed enterprise 5G momentum steadying the vendor while traditional network sales stayed soft, a snapshot of an equipment market waiting for its next buildout cycle.