Diana Goovaerts

After a year of rebidding and guidance changes, the U.S. broadband industry breathed a sigh of relief when the National Telecommunications and Information Administration announced it had approved the vast majority of final state Broadband Equity, Access and Deployment proposals, opening the door for funding to flow.

Great Plains Communications has a lot going on. The company just inked a deal to acquire 40,000 passings from Fastwyre in Nebraska, marking its fifth purchase in the last eight years.

Using AI is kind of like learning to drive a car—you need to figure out how to accelerate and steer before you decide where you want to go. So, it makes sense that one of the keys to AT&T’s strategy as LLMs give way to AI agents is a concept many of us are already familiar with: learner’s permits. Transformation teams across the company now have access to domain-specific AI sandboxes that provide a drag and drop interface enabling them to build agentic workflows.

Europe is bracing for a "long-lasting” energy crisis. The price per gallon for diesel in the U.S. jumped by nearly $2 across the board in March.

Telecommunications operators won’t want to hear this, but the winning AI strategy is simple: Go for the utility play. Utility is a dirty word in the telcommunications industry. Operators fought hard against the label in the battle over net neutrality.

When puzzle pieces are out of order and spread across the table, it’s easy to miss the big picture. But there’s a reason they’re all in the same package. The same could be said of the wide range of announcements coming out of Google over the past year. Allow me to connect some of the puzzle pieces for you. Google’s recent updates are all part of a plan to secure infrastructure dominance. Notably, the company appears to be focusing its efforts across three main areas: compute, communications, and power.

Data centers aren’t typically something you see advertised. But these recent ads aren’t trying to sell you on a graphics processing unit (GPU), cloud platform, or some other product.

When you talk to as many industry players as we do, you start to pick up on trends. Many of these are technical in nature or simply recurring problems that folks are encountering as they all try to tackle the same challenges. But others are just—for lack of a better word—funny. Case in point: Neocloud companies absolutely hate being called neoclouds. This point was independently and organically made by executives from both Nebius and Lambda in recent interviews.

The U.S. job market is sailing through rough seas at the moment. Cuts for the full year have surged past the 1 million mark and the month of October saw the highest number of layoffs in 20 years, according to new data from career change firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas. So, what does this mean for telecommunications and tech employees?

A U.S. government shutdown threatening to begin at 12:01 a.m. Eastern Time on Oct. 1, 2025, will impact the telecommunications industry in a way that is not immediately obvious but still measurable due to the furlough of nearly 90 percent of Federal Communications Commission staff. The FCC already has a shutdown plan in place. Unveiled in March, the plan calls for the Commission to furlough 88 percent of its employees, with just 171 of the agency’s staff of 1,476 remaining to carry out critical functions.