Christmas week delivered a signed law, a longer casualty list, and a stress test nobody framed as one. President Biden signed the 895 billion dollar defense bill on December 23, finally funding the 3 billion dollar rip-and-replace program and setting the spectrum studies that feed the next auction pipeline. Four days later the White House confirmed a ninth US telecom had fallen to Salt Typhoon, attributing the breadth of the compromise to plainly inadequate carrier security. And on Christmas Day, 65 million Americans watched NFL football over Netflix instead of broadcast towers, the largest live sports streaming audience on record and a quiet referendum on whether the nation's broadband was ready for appointment television.
Washington compressed a month of telecom policy into a single Wednesday. On December 11 the Senate Commerce Committee put the Salt Typhoon breach on the public record, with witnesses telling senators that the 3 billion dollars finally headed to the rip-and-replace program was a good start and not a finish. The same day, the FCC voted to open all 1,200 megahertz of the 6 gigahertz band to very low power devices, seeding the next generation of wearables and augmented-reality hardware with unlicensed spectrum. And across the Capitol, the House passed the 895 billion dollar defense bill carrying that rip-and-replace money plus the spectrum studies that will shape the next decade of mid-band auctions.