EchoStar pulled the pin. On May 30 the company elected not to make a 326 million dollar interest payment on its spectrum-secured notes, explicitly blaming the uncertainty created by the FCC's review of its licenses and starting a 30-day grace period clock toward potential default, the opening move in the brinkmanship that would consume the summer. The skipped payment sent a chill through the wireless construction ecosystem, where contractors building EchoStar's 5G network read it as a signal to expect stopped work. Across the Atlantic, the week closed with genuine structural news: Vodafone and Three completed their merger on May 31, creating Britain's largest mobile operator and offering a preview of what regulators accept when markets consolidate from four carriers to three.
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.