A consolidation and infrastructure week. Comcast began lab and field trials of an AI edge platform built on Nvidia GPUs across its roughly 200 edge compute locations, with Charter announcing a similar partnership, a sign the cable industry intends to monetize its physical footprint for AI workloads, not just broadband. New York regulators conditionally approved the Charter and Cox transaction on March 20, leaving California as the last state standing between the companies and a combination that would create the country's largest ISP. And the FCC marked one year of its Council on National Security while granting GCI a waiver tied to replacing covered equipment in Alaska, a reminder that the security review machinery is now a permanent feature of US telecom policy.
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.