Mike Dano

It looks like Congress will remain deadlocked over how to release spectrum for 5G.

Cable company Charter Communications is cutting around 1,000 jobs as part of its efforts to consolidate its call center operations. Charter said it would work to transfer some affected employees to open jobs in other locations. In its latest financial filing, Charter reported around 101,000 full-time employees.

A contentious battle over spectrum between the US Commerce Department and the US Department of Defense (DoD) may have finally come to an end.

The Federal Communications Commission announced new rules governing commercial operations in 3.5GHz CBRS that will expand unencumbered services in the band to an additional 72 million people across more than a dozen states. At issue are the Dynamic Protection Area (DPA) neighborhoods along coastlines and around federal facilities throughout the country.

As part of its ongoing strategic review, Crown Castle said it will cut between 3,000 and 5,000 small cell nodes out of its 2024 construction plans. The company also announced it will cut 10 percent of its workforce. Crown Castle's move casts yet another shadow over the small cell industry in general.

Millions of new fixed wireless access (FWA) customers at Verizon and T-Mobile haven't affected the performance of the operators' respective 5G networks, according to new findings from network-monitoring company Opensignal. "Despite adding more than eight million 5G FWA subs using 400+ GB per month of data since Q1 2021,

According to new figures from Rewheel, T-Mobile's purchase of Sprint in 2020 helped to keep mobile prices in the US sky high. "Five years on, the Sprint / T-Mobile 4-to-3 mobile merger made the US one of the most expensive mobile markets in the world," the Finland-based research firm wrote in a new report.

Slowing growth in the market for telecommunications services appears to be putting additional pressure on network operators in the US. Mergers and acquisitions are on the rise. Layoffs appear to be accelerating.

New customer sign-ups in the US broadband industry slowed down dramatically in the first quarter of this year, according to a pair of analyst groups.

Some smaller US telecommunications providers are toying with the notion of shutting down their copper networks, following years of pioneering efforts by bigger network operators like AT&T and Verizon. According to the financial analysts at New Street Research, Frontier and TDS Telecom are eyeing the savings they might be able to derive from shuttering legacy network technology. To be clear, virtually all of the US market's telco operators are shifting from copper to fiber for their new network buildouts and upgrades.