A Blue Origin hotfire test of its New Glenn rocket last week that ended in a massive explosion in Cape Canaveral, Florida, could substantially delay the satellite deployment efforts of Amazon Leo and AST SpaceMobile, space experts said.
EchoStar aims to sell its remaining terrestrial wireless licenses within 16 months, it told the FCC in a waiver request posted Friday, as it also asked the agency to extend or drop those licenses' buildout deadlines and waive the discontinuance rule. If the waivers are granted, the company will sell its 700 MHz, paired AWS-3, citizens broadband radio service (CBRS), C-band, multichannel video distribution and data service (MVDDS), and millimeter-wave (mmWave) licenses by Sept. 1, 2028, it said in its request (docket 22-212). If those sales don't happen, EchoStar said it will conduct a private auction of the licenses by March 1, 2029.
The European Commission is proposing setting aside a large portion of the 2 GHz mobile satellite service (MSS) spectrum band specifically for European satellite operators, which would significantly affect U.S. satellite operations in Europe.
SpaceX expects to close on its purchase of EchoStar's AWS-4 and H-block spectrum licenses in November 2027 and plans to launch orbiting data center satellites as soon as 2028, it told the SEC Wednesday in its initial public offering prospectus. The company said it also expects to start launching its next-generation V3 satellites in the second half of this year. The V3s are designed to offer 1 Tbps of downlink capacity per satellite, and a single Starship launch could deploy up to 60 V3s, it said.
ORLANDO -- AI inference, in which AI makes quick predictions based on newly supplied data, is going to require many smaller, distributed data centers interconnected by fiber optics, rather than behemoth data center facilities, said data center and network executives at the Fiber Broadband Association's Fiber Connect 2026 event Wednesday.
ORLANDO -- Facing heated demand for fiber-optic cable, Corning is increasingly employing just-in-time delivery for customers’ BEAD-related orders, said Bob Whitman, Corning Optical Communications' vice president of market and product strategy. Fiber demand “is through the roof,” and the company's goal is ensuring that “we're getting them what they need when they need it, and not filling warehouses and stockyards with cable that they might need for their deployment [later],” Whitman told us this week at the Fiber Broadband Association's Fiber Connect 2026 event.
ORLANDO -- Thousands of farmsteads will fall outside BEAD projects and remain unserved or underserved once the connectivity subsidization program is done, warned Autumn Lankford Higgins, director of government affairs for the American Farm Bureau Federation, at Fiber Connect 2026 on Tuesday. BEAD non-deployment dollars need to be focused on connecting those missed locations, she told an audience at the Fiber Broadband Association event, which also included multiple discussions about the obstacles slowing deployments.
ORLANDO -- Fiber network operators from across the Western Hemisphere said Monday at Fiber Connect 2026 that permitting is a common challenge, but beyond that, they often face an array of unique impediments to deployment. Separately at the Fiber Broadband Association event, CTC Technology & Energy President Joanne Hovis warned that the strategy of complaining about and seeking preemption of state and local permitting rules is ultimately harder and costlier than simply engaging with those regulators.
AI and environmental, social and governance (ESG) proposals are heavily represented among shareholder proposals at forthcoming annual shareholder meetings for companies in the technology, media and telecommunication (TMT) space, according to our analysis of spring 2026 proxy filings with the SEC. The Conference Board said there's been a growing trend of anti-ESG proposals.
Only 60% of the satellite launches announced for 2025 actually took place, with the rest pushed to later years because of ongoing launch capacity constraints, BryceTech program analyst Nick Boensch said Wednesday as the Satellite Industry Association (SIA) issued its annual state of the satellite industry report.