Patience Haggin

Charter Communications received the final approval needed to buy fellow cable and broadband provider Cox Communications after making concessions to California regulators, including a commitment to provide affordable internet plans for low-income households.

SpaceX has disrupted the satellite industry. Now, its Starlink unit aims to do the same with America’s telecommunications giants.   SpaceX President Gwynne Shotwell at a meeting with investors earlier this year talked about potentially building out a network on the ground to provide mobile service, people familiar with the matter said.

America’s publicly funded emergency-communications network has sometimes failed during the exact disasters it was built to endure, prompting a bipartisan push for tighter oversight. During a 2024 nationwide network outage for AT&T, which operates the FirstNet service, ambulance crews couldn’t transmit electronic medical records to hospitals.

Fiber cables were laid at a record-high number of homes in 2025, fueled by billions in federal grants for broadband internet. Tech companies’ voracious appetite for data centers is ratcheting up demand further, with the need for millions more miles of cables. Yet the rush to build is hitting a human bottleneck, particularly among workers who can piece together the fiber networks at the heart of the technology. Some jobs take months of training or an artist’s attention to detail; others require the physical strength and stamina to climb telephone poles in summer heat.

After months of regulatory pushback, Verizon finally secured California approval for its $20 billion Frontier acquisition. The California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) unanimously voted in favor of the deal. Following that ruling, Verizon announced it expects to close the transaction on January 20. New Street Policy Analyst Blair Levin said CPUC’s decision was “imminent” based on an Administrative Law Judge’s filing.

Federal Communications Commission Chairman Brendan Carr told a Senate oversight hearing that the FCC isn’t an independent agency, contradicting a description that, until then, had been featured on the Commission’s website. During a Senate Commerce Committee hearing, senators asked the three FCC commissioners whether they believed President Trump could fire them at will. Sen. Ben Ray Luján (D-NM) cited the FCC’s website, which referred to it as “independent.” “The FCC isn’t an independent agency, formally speaking,” Chairman Carr said.

AT&T, T-Mobile and Verizon have long traded barbs over who offers the most reliable service, best price, and broadest wireless-service coverage. Now some are upping the ante with explicit poaching efforts—and litigation. This fall, both Verizon and T-Mobile launched promotions designed to lure in their competitors’ customers. Verizon’s “Bring Your Bill” campaign invites AT&T and T-Mobile customers to upload their bills or bring them in-store to get a counteroffer from Verizon.

A growing number of states are rolling out subsidies for satellite connectivity in rural areas, a change that could be a boon to Elon Musk’s Starlink and Amazon's Kuiper. From Maine to Nevada, states are starting to help some of the 24 million Americans who lack reliable broadband pay for satellite internet, rather than focusing such aid primarily on fiber connectivity as they have in the past. Fiber-optic cables provide the most reliable internet service and the most durable infrastructure, but are costly to install.

America’s cable giants are being squeezed from all sides. Competition from wireless carriers is surging. Government subsidies are on hold. The onetime fortress of cable TV has all but crumbled. Those forces propelled the $21.9 billion deal Charter Communications struck to buy Cox Communications. A decade ago, broadband providers pursued big mergers to protect their ailing TV businesses.

Alphabet's Google created a monopoly that allowed it to control parts of the online-advertising industry, a federal judge ruled April 17, a decision that could upend one of the technology giant’s core businesses. The ruling marked the second time in eight months that a U.S.