A week where the future of wireless distribution and the future of spectrum policy both moved. US Mobile, the multi-network MVNO, teased and then launched a bundle with Starlink that pairs satellite home internet with unlimited mobile service for under $50 a month, a pairing no national carrier currently offers. At the FCC, the agency opened public comment on Qualcomm's petition to create a new device-to-device service called Sidelink, and the clock ran out on upfront payments for Auction 113, the AWS-3 auction that will put fresh mid-band spectrum on the block in June. Quiet on the surface, but each story points at where the industry's center of gravity is shifting.
The week opened with AT&T closing its $5.75 billion purchase of Lumen's Mass Markets fiber business, a deal that adds more than one million fiber subscribers and four million passings in metros like Denver, Seattle, and Salt Lake City. The strategic message was blunt: the acquired network sits at roughly 25 percent penetration against AT&T's own 40 percent, so the work now shifts from building fiber to selling it. Midweek, Qualcomm posted record fiscal first quarter revenue of $12.3 billion but watched its stock slide as much as 10 percent after warning that a global memory shortage would squeeze the phones its chips go into. And all week, the three national carriers raced to finish one of the largest venue network builds ever attempted, turning Levi's Stadium into a proving ground ahead of Sunday's Super Bowl LX, with the same infrastructure set to serve the World Cup this summer.
Apple finally built its own modem, and the industry's most feared hackers turned out to still be inside the walls. The iPhone 16e, announced February 19 at 599 dollars, carries the C1, Apple's first in-house cellular modem after seven years and billions of dollars of effort, beginning the end of its dependence on Qualcomm and giving the company control of the silicon that connects a billion devices to carrier networks. The security news was darker: threat researchers confirmed that Salt Typhoon, the Chinese state group that penetrated US carriers last year, remained active into 2025, compromising additional telecom networks through unpatched Cisco routers and stolen credentials, months after the intrusions were first exposed.