Telecom Intelligence: Week of April 20, 2026
Two days after losing a satellite on the launch pad of ambition, AST SpaceMobile got the piece of paper it has chased for years: on April 21 the FCC granted commercial authority for the company to deliver direct-to-device cellular broadband from space across the United States, clearing a 248-satellite constellation and moving satellite-to-phone service from experiment to product. The same week, AT&T opened big-carrier earnings season with strong first quarter results built on bundled fiber and wireless, and Nokia closed out the vendor picture with its own first quarter report. Regulatory green lights, healthy carrier economics, and a recovering equipment market: the industry's spring is running warmer than its winter did.
Telecom Intelligence: Week of February 10, 2025
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.
Telecom Intelligence: Week of October 14, 2024
Vendor earnings told a tale of one market: Ericsson rode a 55% North America surge — powered by its landmark AT&T deal — back to fat margins, while Nokia posted its own gross-margin recovery on shrinking sales and kept waiting for the US spending wave to reach it. Meanwhile the quiet dismantling of UScellular continued, with Verizon writing a $1 billion check for 850 MHz and AWS spectrum the T-Mobile deal left behind. The week's throughline: capital is flowing again in US wireless — into radios and into spectrum — but it is flowing to fewer, bigger players.
Telecom Intelligence: Week of July 15, 2024
A single faulty software update ended the week by grounding airlines, silencing broadcasters, and knocking out 911 centers: CrowdStrike's botched Falcon sensor push bricked some 8.5 million Windows machines in the largest IT outage in history. Earlier in the week, EchoStar relaunched Boost Mobile as a self-declared fourth carrier on its cloud-native 5G network with a $25-forever flagship plan, the FCC proposed requiring all phones be unlocked 60 days after activation, and Nokia's second quarter confirmed that operator equipment spending remains stuck in a deep trough.