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.
The outgoing administration spent its final full week hardening the digital walls, and the courts turned off an app used by 170 million Americans. The FCC, in Chairwoman Rosenworcel's closing days, voted to declare that federal wiretap law obligates carriers to secure their networks, the agency's most direct regulatory answer yet to the Salt Typhoon intrusions, over Republican objections that guaranteed the ruling a short life. The Supreme Court unanimously upheld the TikTok divest-or-ban law on January 17, and by the night of January 18 the app had gone dark for US users, the most consequential government action against a communications platform in the internet era, with service providers and app stores suddenly on the legal front line.
The year changed and so did two decades of regulatory architecture. On January 2 the Sixth Circuit struck down the FCC's net neutrality rules outright, ruling in the first major post-Chevron test that the agency never had the authority to classify broadband as a telecom service, and ending a twenty-year seesaw unless Congress writes it into law. Days earlier, AT&T, Verizon, and Lumen declared their networks clear of Salt Typhoon, statements that landed awkwardly against a White House count that was still climbing. And Vodafone closed the books on its European retreat, completing the 8 billion euro sale of Vodafone Italia to Swisscom on New Year's Eve.
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.
The satellite era got a signup page. T-Mobile opened beta registration for its Starlink direct-to-cell service on December 16, inviting ordinary customers to test satellite texting on the phones already in their pockets, while the same day in Brussels the SpaceRISE consortium signed the 10.6 billion euro concession to build IRIS2, Europe's sovereign answer to the constellations it does not control. Two days later CISA told the government's most targeted people to stop trusting carrier voice and SMS altogether and move to end-to-end encrypted apps, the bluntest official verdict yet on the Salt Typhoon aftermath. And SoftBank's Masayoshi Son stood next to the president-elect and pledged 100 billion dollars for American AI infrastructure, the kind of number that eventually lands on networks.
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.
December opened with the quiet part said out loud: Chinese state hackers had burrowed into at least eight US telecom providers, and the government's advice to Americans was to encrypt their way around the phone network. The FCC answered within a day, moving to turn a 30-year-old wiretap statute into a cybersecurity mandate for carriers. Away from the breach, AT&T used its first analyst day in years to commit to 50 million fiber locations and a copper farewell by 2029, Britain's competition regulator blessed the 15 billion pound Vodafone-Three merger with MVNO protections attached, and eSIM Go teamed with Vodafone UK to sell the MVNO model itself as a boxed product.
The industry got its new referee and lost its biggest pending deal in the same week. Donald Trump named Brendan Carr, the FCC's senior Republican and author of its Project 2025 chapter, as chairman, ending two weeks of speculation and starting the countdown on the Biden-era agenda. By Friday, DirecTV had walked away from its acquisition of Dish after bondholders refused the haircut the deal required, Comcast confirmed it will spin off most of its cable networks into a separate company, and the White House summoned carrier executives to face the Salt Typhoon crisis directly.
The rumor became official. The FBI and CISA jointly confirmed that hackers tied to the Chinese government have compromised networks at multiple U.S. telecom companies, stealing call records and intercepting communications around court-ordered wiretap systems, and by Friday the Wall Street Journal had added T-Mobile to the list of names. Against that backdrop the deal machine kept turning: Frontier shareholders blessed Verizon's $20 billion fiber acquisition, and Charter moved to absorb Liberty Broadband and simplify the ownership of America's second-largest cable company.
Salt Typhoon went from national-security story to election story: reporting on Friday revealed the Chinese hackers had targeted phones used by Donald Trump, JD Vance, and people associated with the Harris campaign — placing the carrier breach at the center of American politics eleven days before the vote. Against that backdrop, earnings week played out almost quaintly: T-Mobile posted industry-leading growth and raised guidance across the board, while Verizon held serve on wireless service revenue while absorbing $1.7 billion in severance charges and doubling down on fixed wireless as its growth engine.
The industry absorbed two shocks in a single week. The Wall Street Journal's revelation that China-linked hackers penetrated AT&T, Verizon, and Lumen — apparently through the very systems built to serve court-ordered wiretaps — turned into a full Washington firestorm, with House Energy and Commerce leaders demanding answers from all three carriers by week's end. Meanwhile, Hurricane Milton slammed into Florida days after Helene devastated the Southeast, and for the first time at scale, the FCC let T-Mobile and SpaceX switch on satellite texting for every compatible phone in the storm zone regardless of carrier. One story exposed the network's oldest vulnerability; the other previewed its newest safety net.