Monica Alleven

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.

The bravado was on full display when T-Mobile executives took the stage this week to declare network victory based on the Best Mobile Network award from Ookla.

Go big or go home. That’s the strategy Verizon appears to be taking with the overhaul of its customer service strategy. How big?

By a 53-45 vote, the Senate confirmed Olivia Trusty to be the third commissioner at the Federal Communications Commission. Sen. John Fetterman (D-PA) was the only Democrat to vote in her favor. Trusty was a longtime staffer for Sen.

Shares of EchoStar were up more than 45 percent after a report surfaced that President Trump intervened in the dramatic conflict involving EchoStar Chairman Charlie Ergen and Federal Communications Commission Chairman Brendan Carr. According to Bloomberg, Ergen met with President Trump on June 12, a day after a long-awaited meeting with FCC Chairman Brendan Carr.

In an astonishing turn of events, a former Republican Federal Communications Commission commissioner slammed fellow Republican and FCC Chairman Brendan Carr for making a “dangerous mistake” in threatening to take away EchoStar’s spectrum licenses. “The FCC threatens such severe sanctions that they put EchoStar’s financial viability in question and threaten to kill the company,” newly ex-FCC commissioner Nathan Simington wrote in an opinion piece.

AT&T doesn’t immediately need more spectrum, but it’s always on the lookout for additional airwaves to meet future demands, AT&T CFO Pascal Desroches. However, it’s the part about not needing spectrum right this minute that AT&T’s rivals in the cable industry seized upon, maintaining that he’s saying the “quiet part out loud,” contradicting arguments that AT&T and its fellow wireless carriers are making in Washington (DC) about the dire need for more spectrum, stat. Desroches said that when he took the CFO role at AT&T almost five years ago, the company was concerned abo

EchoStar is in a fight for its life, and its latest salvo used Federal Communications Commission Chairman Brendan Carr’s own words to explain why the agency should not backtrack after the company spent billions of dollars deploying a 5G network using spectrum the FCC authorized it to use. Then-Commissioner Carr in June 2023 appeared before a House subcommittee hearing where he was asked about calls for the FCC to reverse spectrum allocation decisions.

The Federal Communications Commission’s inquiries into EchoStar’s terrestrial wireless and satellite businesses are already harming the company’s plans to succeed as the fourth facilities-based U.S. wireless carrier. That’s what EchoStar told the agency in a nearly 90-page filing. The FCC recently opened public notices about EchoStar’s 5G buildout and its use of the 2 GHz spectrum band for mobile satellite services.

Some good, some bad. That’s the short version of what the Wireless Internet Service Providers Association (WISPA) had to say about that so-called “One Big Beautiful Bill” that passed the House on May 22. The House-passed reconciliation bill includes provisions that would restore the Federal Communications Commission’s authority to conduct spectrum auctions and direct the FCC to auction off 600 megahertz of spectrum within a certain timeframe.