Mike Dano

A new lawsuit from fiber operator Metronet accuses officials from the City of Colorado Springs of blocking the company's fiber network construction efforts in the city. The reason? The city's utility is building its own, rival fiber network.

T-Mobile said it modified, changed and ended some of its diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts in its bid to receive regulatory approval for its deal with EQT for fiber operator Lumos.

AT&T is preparing a $5.5 billion bid for Lumen Technologies' consumer fiber operations. If that deal goes through, it would have significant implications for other players in the space—particularly T-Mobile.

It was initially viewed as a "once in a lifetime" funding effort, a moonshot geared toward connecting all Americans to the Internet after the COVID-19 pandemic revealed the extent of the digital divide in the US.

Nokia has been hyping its planned moon network for almost five years now. However, the robot carrying the network to the moon landed wrong and, as a result, Nokia was unable to notch a PR win by placing the first cellular call on the moon. The company said the network ran on the moon for about 25 minutes after Intuitive Machines' robot landed. "Unfortunately, Nokia was unable to make the first cellular call on the moon due to factors beyond our control that resulted in extreme cold temperatures on our user device modules," the company said.

US cable companies Comcast and Charter Communications have long suggested that they will build their own small-scale public wireless networks using their 3.5GHz CBRS spectrum holdings. Doing so, according to the companies, will help them reduce their MVNO payments to Verizon.

Amid a raging debate over the value of the 3.5GHz CBRS band, Lumen Technologies has apparently decided it's no longer interested in holding those spectrum licenses.

Although there's nothing concrete yet on the topic from Trump 2.0, Washington insiders are growing more hopeful that the new US president will push through regulations that will help 5G network operators deploy more cell towers for services like fixed wireless access (FWA). That would undoubtedly please big 5G carriers like Verizon and T-Mobile as well as smaller players like C Spire, which are already offering FWA service to millions of customers.

An AT&T effort to replace aging copper connections with wireless options is gaining regulatory steam, potentially paving the way for more operators to do the same. That could have significant implications for the wireless network operators offering those alternatives.

T-Mobile is part of the consortium that won Louisiana's biggest Broadband Equity Access and Deployment (BEAD) award. However, the company declined to provide much detail about the role it's playing. "We'll be bringing wireless service on our 5G network," a T-Mobile representative wrote. The representative declined to provide details. Thus, it's not clear whether T-Mobile is funding the consortium, or whether it will provide fixed wireless or mobile services to Louisiana's BEAD locations.