T-Mobile used the year's biggest stage to make satellite texting a mass-market product. In a Super Bowl commercial on February 9, the carrier announced its Starlink-powered direct-to-device beta was open to everyone, including Verizon and AT&T customers, free until July, an audacious play that turned a network feature into a customer acquisition funnel running inside rival subscriber bases. Within a day, both rivals rushed out their own satellite messaging talking points. In Espoo, Nokia reached outside telecom entirely for its next chief executive, naming Intel data center and AI chief Justin Hotard to replace Pekka Lundmark, the clearest statement yet that the vendor sees its future in AI infrastructure rather than radio access alone.
T-Mobile used its first Capital Markets Day since the Sprint merger to declare what it wants to be next: an AI-powered, satellite-augmented growth machine, unveiling an OpenAI partnership, a first-responder network slice, and financial targets through 2027. The week's darker story was in Lebanon, where thousands of exploding pagers and radios turned supply-chain integrity from an abstract procurement concern into a visceral global headline. And in chips, reports that Qualcomm had approached Intel about a takeover — a deal unthinkable five years earlier — captured how completely the silicon order beneath the telecom industry has been scrambled.
T-Mobile closed out carrier earnings season the way it has for years — on top, with 777,000 postpaid phone additions and raised guidance. Then the week turned dark for the chip sector: Intel announced 15,000 layoffs, suspended its dividend, and watched its stock suffer the worst single-day collapse since 1974, raising hard questions about America's flagship chipmaker just as CHIPS Act money flows. And the Sixth Circuit stayed the FCC's net neutrality rules outright, wielding the Supreme Court's new anti-deference doctrine in its first big telecom test.
AT&T opened April cleaning up after a dataset covering 73 million current and former customers surfaced on a cybercrime forum — forcing millions of account passcodes to be reset and kicking off a breach saga that would shadow the carrier all year. Intel gave Wall Street its first honest look at the cost of rebuilding American chipmaking, disclosing a $7 billion operating loss in its foundry business. And Taiwan's strongest earthquake in 25 years rattled the island that fabricates most of the world's advanced chips — TSMC evacuated fabs, then restarted with minimal damage, a near-miss reminder of how concentrated the silicon supply chain remains.