Monica Alleven

President Donald Trump called on Congress to put 600 MHz of spectrum up for auction as part of the “One Big Beautiful Bill” that’s making its way through the House.

Consumer advocacy groups and rural wireless operators continue to voice their concerns about the tie-up between T-Mobile and UScellular. Recently, they added a new twist to their requests: They want the Federal Communications Commission to view UScellular’s separate spectrum deals as one big single transaction. T-Mobile struck a deal to acquire UScellular’s wireless assets and 4 million customers in May 2024, including its 600 MHz, 700 MHz, 2.5 GHz, AWS and PCS spectrum. A few months later, AT&T and Verizon agreed to buy some of UScellular’s spectrum for about $1 billion each.

To hear Federated Wireless CEO Iyad Tarazi tell it, the Citizens Broadband Radio Services market is going gangbusters. Why is he saying that? Well, the CBRS industry has taken a bit of a beating the past few years, namely from the U.S. wireless industry’s biggest lobbying group, CTIA.

Time to get the popcorn out while we take a stroll through the latest in the war of the terrestrial wireless industry vs. Elon Musk and his space-based friends. The battle rose to the surface recently when Federal Communications Commission Chairman Brendan Carr launched a formal inquiry to study new ways of making use of 220 megahertz of spectrum in the upper C-band.

T-Mobile just upped the ante on 5G upload speeds, announcing that it set a new uplink speed record of 550 Mbps using 5G Advanced technology. Why is it significant? According to T-Mobile President of Technology, Ulf Ewaldsson, “uplink is the next big thing.” Others tend to agree, as the industry is increasingly putting more focus on uplink after years of concentrating on the downlink.

T-Mobile deserves credit for rolling out edgy “un-carrier” moves over the years, but lately, it seems to be going backwards. Take the recent rollout of the Experience More and Experience Beyond plans. They’re advertised as $5 less per line than previous Go5G plans. But T-Mobile is no longer offering these new plans with “taxes and fees included,” which was an “un-carrier” move that T-Mobile launched in 2017. “The un-carrier spirit has been slowly disappearing,” said Roger Entner, founder of Recon Analytics.

AT&T floated a proposal in fall 2024 to move the Citizens Broadband Radio Services from the middle of the 3 GHz band to the lower part of the band, and it looks like the Department of Defense is on board with that plan, according to New Street Research analysis.

Competition in the public safety market has increased ever since AT&T won the contract to provide the network for the FirstNet Authority—and now it’s getting even hotter in the 5G era as carriers roll out more advanced technologies like network slicing.

It’s a question that has baffled many minds for years. The mismatch between the U.S. population growth rate and U.S. wireless carriers’ ability to add oodles of new phone customers every quarter has mystified some Wall Street analysts for eons. “Investors have been puzzling over the industry’s ‘excess growth’ for years now,” wrote Craig Moffett of MoffettNathanson Research. “Wireless is, after all, a fully saturated industry in the U.S.

It’s been a long time coming, but T-Mobile has found a buyer for the 800 MHz spectrum it inherited from Sprint.