Roger Entner

The AWS-3 reauction closed at $3.57 billion, and the number is inflated. Strip out EchoStar, which bid to raise prices rather than to win, and the auction raises about $2.0 billion. EchoStar walked away with two trivial licenses in Guam. Its purpose was never to win spectrum; it was to push the clearing price past the roughly $2.9 billion that erased its own default penalty, and Verizon and T-Mobile paid the difference.

America has two half-connected segments and a third that is not connected at all, and the policy conversation gets all three wrong. The two half-connected segments are mirror images, each on a single network: the household with a phone and no home internet, 14.8 million strong at 11.5% of the country in the 2024 American Community Survey five-year estimates, and its mirror, the household with home broadband and no cell phone, three to six million adults the industry does not track.

The simple story about wireless is a price war: multi-year price locks, free lines, cable carriers underselling the mobile network operators, and fixed wireless exceeding everyone's expectations. A more complex story is revealed by the MNOs' detailed earnings results. The core price of connectivity has been flat for nearly four years while household income has increased. Net net? The carriers turned themselves into discount storefronts for the services they sell. Reported wireless revenue per line looks like it climbed.

The three nationwide mobile network operators spent the Q1 2026 earnings cycle saying no to a Starlink MVNO. On May 12, the Federal Communications Commission approved SpaceX's purchase of 65 megahertz of nationwide Direct-to-Device spectrum under tech-neutral performance obligations. Four days later, the wireless carriers announced a satellite joint venture without a name and with a lot of intentions. The market has been reading the JV as a defensive moat against SpaceX. It is not.

Marketing has been calling it convergence for twenty years. Every carrier's annual investor day has featured a bundle slide. Most of them have been wrong about what they were selling. Real convergence, as a seamless, better-together service, is still years away. What we have settled on calling convergence is selling wireless and home Internet to the same customer. What we have is one company owning both the fiber running under the street and the wireless network running over it, allowing that company's market share to compound.

Recon Analytics has tracked consumer wireless and broadband behavior continuously since July 2022, accumulating almost 1.5 million survey responses across the US consumer telecommunications market. This weekly dataset captures the 5G era in real time, measuring satisfaction, churn intent, and competitive positioning at ZIP code granularity. Six years after the first nationwide commercial 5G networks in December 2019, the technology has delivered results that confound the original hype cycle. Some promises materialized in unexpected ways. Others collapsed entirely.

Cable operators are transforming the wireless industry, not through clever marketing or promotional pricing, but through network jiu-jitsu that turns their existing cable plant into a weapon against the carriers who once held all the leverage.

The US wireless market has been irrevocably altered. AT&T's definitive agreement to acquire 50MHz of nationwide spectrum from EchoStar for approximately $23 billion is not merely a transaction; it is the final, politically brokered act in the long-running drama of the fourth facilities-based carrier.

In a meeting with officials at the Federal Communications Commission, Recon Analytics shared results of a survey of 4,000 consumer mobile and 4,000 home internet consumers.

Recon Analytics recently conducted the largest survey run to date to assess whether consumers eligible for the Affordable Connectivity Program (ACP) are actually enrolling and if so, what they are using their ACP funds for. We asked 29,141 ACP-eligible Americans if they use ACP, and, if so, for what. The big question inside the Beltway is whether funding the ACP is a good use of taxpayer dollars. The ReconAnalytics survey indicates that if Congress is interested in seeing itself reelected, extending the ACP funding might be a good idea.