Jeff Baumgartner

Federal Communications Commission Chairman Brendan Carr is already a big fan of SpaceX's proposed deal to acquire a swath of spectrum from Charlie Ergen's EchoStar to underpin an advanced direct-to-device offering. The deal "is a potential gamechanger for the American consumer—it promises to light up new spectrum and bring new sources of competition to the wireless and connectivity market.

Major US cable operators have been adamant that they'll return to broadband subscriber growth over time, but have been careful to avoid precise predictions on when the tide will turn. And for good reason. They remain under pressure from fiber and fixed wireless access competition, which is further amplified by a slowdown in residential relocation and new home construction.

EchoStar's path as the nation's fourth facilities-based wireless carrier is vanishing after the struggling Colorado-based company agreed to sell a swath of low-band and mid-band spectrum to AT&T for a tidy sum of $23 billion. However, it's not immediately clear if the agreement will fully satisfy the Federal Communications Commission's investigation into EchoStar's federa

AT&T CEO John Stankey shed a bit more light on how quickly his company will be able to deploy the spectrum it's poised to acquire from EchoStar for $23 billion.

Charter Communications continues to manage its way through broadband subscriber losses linked to the demise of the Affordable Connectivity Program in 2024.

In comments that should be comforting to ears in the cable industry, Federal Communications Commissioner Anna Gomez stressed that the agency should continue to pursue sharing arrangements amid the FCC's mandate to free up and auction 800MHz of spectrum in the coming years. And that goes for the CBRS band—shared spectrum that Comcast, Charter Communications, Mediacom Communications, and Cox Communications are using to either offload mobile traffic in high-density areas or for fixed wireless access services.

The $42.45 billion Broadband Equity Access and Deployment program is moving ahead again following changes to a less fiber-focused and more cost-oriented approach that has opened the door to fixed wireless access and satellite broadband options.

Mediacom Communications has shed more light on its hybrid fiber/coax network upgrade plans, announcing that it intends to offer multi-gigabit and symmetrical broadband speeds to 1 million homes by the end of 2026. That segment of the upgrade will cover about one-third of Mediacom's current footprint. Mediacom said it has already deployed speed upgrades to more than 185,000 households in some of its larger systems in Iowa, including Cedar Rapids, Des Moines and West Des Moines, along with some smaller systems serving parts of Kentucky and Minnesota.

The US Department of Justice blessed T-Mobile's proposed acquisition of UScellular, holding that the combination won't do enough harm to competition to "warrant an enforcement action." But the DoJ still expressed concerns about how the mobile market could be negatively affected by additional consolidation. The DoJ also claims UScell

EchoStar Chairman Charlie Ergen is buying himself some more time to work out a deal with the Federal Communications Commission, making more than $500 million in debt-interest payments and delaying an imminent potential bankruptcy filing. The interest payment was revealed in an 8-K filing, in which EchoStar answered a couple of questions that were looming over the company.