The FCC's math changed on March 18. Democratic Commissioner Geoffrey Starks announced he would resign in the spring, a departure that would hand Chairman Carr a working Republican majority months before a new commissioner could be confirmed, easing the path for everything from deregulation to merger conditions. The same day produced the year's biggest security deal, with Google agreeing to acquire cloud security firm Wiz for 32 billion dollars, the largest acquisition in Google's history and a signal of how seriously the cloud giants are arming up as infrastructure attacks like Salt Typhoon reshape enterprise demand. The week also delivered MWC's considered verdict, as analyst retrospectives separated Barcelona's durable signals, satellite, AI-RAN economics, open networks, from its considerable noise.
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.