A landmark close, a regulatory earthquake in Europe, and the first big vendor scorecard of the year. On January 20, Verizon completed its roughly $20 billion acquisition of Frontier Communications, instantly expanding its fiber reach to nearly 30 million homes and businesses across 31 states. The same day in Brussels, the European Commission published its Cybersecurity Act 2 proposal, which for the first time would give the EU a binding framework to phase out high-risk suppliers from telecom networks and 17 other critical sectors, a move widely read as targeting Huawei and ZTE. And on January 23, Ericsson closed out 2025 with fourth quarter organic sales growth of 6 percent and its strongest margins in years, evidence that network spending has stabilized even as the RAN market stays flat.
A week about the plumbing of the industry rather than its headlines. Juniper Research published new figures showing travel eSIM revenue reaching 1.8 billion dollars in 2025, up 85 percent in a single year, confirming how quickly downloadable SIMs are eating international roaming. On October 14 Ericsson reported third quarter results, with sales down but margins holding as the vendor leaned on major contracts in India, Japan, and the UK. And on October 15 Samsung announced a multi-country deal to deploy virtualized, O-RAN compliant network equipment for Vodafone across Europe, starting in Germany and covering thousands of sites over five years.
T-Mobile used the year's biggest stage to make satellite texting a mass-market product. In a Super Bowl commercial on February 9, the carrier announced its Starlink-powered direct-to-device beta was open to everyone, including Verizon and AT&T customers, free until July, an audacious play that turned a network feature into a customer acquisition funnel running inside rival subscriber bases. Within a day, both rivals rushed out their own satellite messaging talking points. In Espoo, Nokia reached outside telecom entirely for its next chief executive, naming Intel data center and AI chief Justin Hotard to replace Pekka Lundmark, the clearest statement yet that the vendor sees its future in AI infrastructure rather than radio access alone.