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 Friday. On May 16 the FCC approved Verizon's 20 billion dollar acquisition of Frontier Communications, clearing the largest fiber deal in years after Verizon agreed to end its diversity, equity, and inclusion programs, an unprecedented condition that signaled how this FCC will price its approvals. The same day, Charter and Cox announced a 34.5 billion dollar merger to create the country's largest cable operator by footprint, a defensive consolidation aimed squarely at the broadband share being taken by fiber and fixed wireless. And EchoStar formally answered the FCC's review letters, disclosing in securities filings that the inquiry was creating uncertainty around its obligations, the first tremor of the payment standoff to come.
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.
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.