Network management

The FirstNet Authority allocated $1.1 billion of its fiscal 2027 budget, which starts October 2026, for network improvements and approved 220 new cell sites in rural areas for AT&T to build based on public safety input. There are now 350 FirstNet sites in development.

Americans continue to demand more wireless data to power everything—from AI to wearables, digital streaming services, and more. In 2025 alone, Americans used a staggering 159.3 trillion megabytes of data—20 percent more data than was used the previous year and 39 percent more data than was used during the entire 4G decade. That growth reflects the increasingly central role wireless plays in everyday life, as data demand is expected to grow 4x by 2032. And the growth of AI will place an even greater strain on America’s wireless networks.

Optimum Communications Chairman and CEO Dennis Mathew dropped a bit of news on Optimum's Q2 earnings call about the company's growing mobile business, noting that the operator recently expanded its multiyear Mobile Virtual Network Operator agreement with T-Mobile.

A recurrent theme from US cellular industry commentary in recent years has been complaints about supposedly unused or underused spectrum that could be put to "better" use. Yet there is surprisingly little focus on the major carriers' own fallow and underused spectrum assets, which deserve similar scrutiny. We have heard repeated claims that Citizens Broadband Radio Service spectrum is not used sufficiently or that dynamic sharing mechanisms are allegedly inefficient. The benefits of technology innovation and new deployment models are downplayed.

CONX, Charlie Ergen's special-purpose acquisition company, is taking a majority stake in MobileX, Peter Adderton's MVNO that runs on the Verizon mobile network, a recent Federal Communications Commission filing confirms.

Wireless carriers are resolving customer problems faster, delivering consistently high-quality service and demonstrating great value for the price they are paying. Overall customer satisfaction with wireless carriers is up 10 points (on a 1,000-point scale) on average. Increased use of artificial intelligence (AI) in the customer support function is playing an important role in changing the way customers interact with their carriers, but is delivering mixed results when it comes to overall customer satisfaction.

With the sixth generation of wireless communications now clearly on the horizon, the governments of Albania, Australia, Canada, Costa Rica, Czechia, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Honduras, Italy, Japan, Latvia, Lithuania, Norway, Panama, Paraguay, the Philippines, the Republic of Korea, Romania, Sweden, the United Kingdom, and the United States affirm the following Call to Action for 6G Leadership and Security. We invite other like-minded governments to join us in affirming:

In a recent request filed with the FCC, Starlink asked to increase the size of its broadband satellite fleet to 100,000. This coincided with the FCC’s announcement that it wants to ease the process for approving new satellites, so I have to think the idea will sail through. There was one extraordinary statement in this filing that is the topic of today’s blog. SpaceX said it has the goal of handling the majority of the world’s Internet traffic. Elon Musk has always been one for huge hyperbole, so statements like this are not surprising.

Scientists have warned for decades about the possibility of Kessler syndrome, a scenario in which orbital debris collisions perpetuate an unending cycle of collisions.

AI has changed what a good mobile network looks like, and the metric the industry has marketed for two decades—peak download speed—no longer predicts it. The networks that top the download charts are often not the ones best prepared for AI traffic. Whether an AI application feels instant or breaks depends in large part on how much a network can upload, how it holds up under load, and how consistently it reaches the cloud, and on those measures, different networks come out on top.