Groundwave Weekly — Jul 30, 2026

Control points defined the week. AT&T acquired more of the American airwaves, the Federal Communications Commission set a date for new submarine-cable rules, and the U.S. Space Force funded software to allocate protected satellite links during a crisis. Italy offered a quieter warning: control over communications can look less like cutting a cable than making a website seem never to have existed.

AT&T now controls approximately $23 billion more of the American airwaves. The company completed its purchase of roughly 50 megahertz of low- and mid-band spectrum licenses from EchoStar. According to AT&T, those licenses cover virtually every U.S. market. (AT&T Just Bought a Nationwide Layer of Air)

Low-band frequencies travel farther and penetrate buildings well. Mid-band frequencies offer the balance of coverage and capacity that carries most practical 5G traffic. Together, they give AT&T more room for coverage, uplink capacity and future 5G-Advanced services without waiting for another auction. (AT&T Just Bought a Nationwide Layer of Air)

If AT&T deploys the licenses quickly, network gains could arrive through existing towers and compatible phones rather than a nationwide construction program. Smaller carriers and private-network providers, however, face a market where the most useful frequencies are concentrating inside companies with national infrastructure and enormous capital budgets. (AT&T Just Bought a Nationwide Layer of Air)

Failure will look less dramatic: licenses sitting underused as device support, radio upgrades and interference coordination drag on. Watch AT&T’s first band-by-band deployment schedule—not how much air it owns, but when customers can use it. (AT&T Just Bought a Nationwide Layer of Air)

Ukraine’s Open RAN trial is leaving the lab. Japan’s Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry awarded Rakuten Symphony a subsidy of up to ¥350 million, about $2.1 million, for an Open Radio Access Network trial with Kyivstar in Ukraine. Rakuten Symphony and Kyivstar have completed 4G laboratory interoperability testing; the funded next stage will install outdoor equipment around Kyiv and carry commercial traffic.

Open RAN separates radio-network components that traditionally arrive as one vendor-controlled package. For Ukraine, the practical appeal is repairability: damaged equipment could potentially be replaced from a broader supplier pool instead of waiting for one incumbent manufacturer.

A successful trial would give Open RAN something it badly needs—a reference deployment where flexibility is measured against power disruptions, damaged infrastructure and operational pressure, not conference slides. It could also help Kyivstar compare distributed processing near cell sites with centralized processing shared across several sites.

Failure will look like endless integration work, unstable service or a quiet return to tightly coupled equipment. Kyivstar’s customer performance data and the number of genuinely interchangeable components will reveal whether openness delivers resilience or merely relocates complexity.

The FCC’s new submarine-cable rules are now on the calendar. The Federal Register published the Federal Communications Commission’s rules on July 27, making part of the regime effective September 25. The rules extend licensing and security oversight to submarine line terminal equipment—the optical hardware where signals from undersea fiber enter terrestrial networks. (FCC sets the first effective date for its submarine-cable terminal rules)

Much of the regime remains in limbo. Many licensing, certification, reporting and security provisions will stay delayed until the FCC publishes another effective-date notice. The compliance clock has started, but much of the filing machinery has not.

If implementation works, the FCC will gain a clearer map of who owns, operates and can administer the equipment connecting international cables to the United States. Operators that already track vendors, capacity leases and foreign access arrangements should have an advantage.

If implementation bogs down, consortium-owned cables and smaller operators may face uncertainty without delivering much additional security. The decisive signal will be the FCC’s next notice: which delayed provisions receive dates, and how much documentation cable operators must produce.

The Space Force has put $287 million behind software that decides who gets a protected link under pressure. U.S. Space Systems Command awarded Sphinx Defense a $287 million Other Transaction Authority agreement on July 27 to complete the third prototype phase of Evolved Strategic Satellite Communications mission-planning software. (theinformation.com)

Evolved Strategic Satellite Communications is intended to provide jam-resistant communications for nuclear command, control and communications. Sphinx Defense is not building the satellites; it is developing the software that assigns protected links, terminals and satellite resources when the network is under stress.

If the prototype succeeds, mission planning becomes part of the communications weapon system rather than an administrative layer attached afterward. Commanders could reallocate scarce links as jamming, equipment loss or changing missions alter the network.

Failure would appear as brittle software, slow reconfiguration or continued dependence on manual workarounds. Because this remains prototype development rather than an operational deployment, the meaningful next evidence will be completion of Phase 3 testing and a transition into fielded Space Force operations.

Italian networks made reproductive-health websites disappear in plain sight. The Open Observatory of Network Interference published measurements on July 28 documenting the blocking of Women on Web and Women Help Women across Italian networks including Fastweb, Sky Italia, Iliad, Scaleway, Vodafone Italia, EOLO, WIND TRE and INTRED. The exact provider list differed between the two reproductive-health services.

Several networks returned NXDOMAIN, the Domain Name System response normally meaning that a domain does not exist. Others directed requests to 127.0.0.1, the user’s own device. Sky Italia redirected requests toward infrastructure presenting a certificate containing blocking.it.isp.sky.

OONI’s measurements indicate that blocking began around mid-February. OONI did not identify a transparent, publicly explained nationwide order covering all the interference it observed.

If Italian authorities disclose a legal basis and appeals process, this becomes a visible—if controversial—content-regulation system. If they do not, internet service providers retain the ability to make lawful information resemble an ordinary technical failure. The next signal is whether Italy’s Communications Regulatory Authority or judicial authorities explain who ordered the blocks and how affected organizations can challenge them.

A nuclear network hired a traffic cop. Kyiv prepared to test modular cell towers under wartime conditions. Italian browsers were told to knock on their own front doors.

The internet’s most efficient censorship interface remains an error message everyone has learned to ignore.

Keep a spare route.

Forward this to the person who still thinks connectivity is just bars on a phone.

Iran’s communications and targeting architecture is becoming the campaign’s center of gravity. Read → The Iran Campaign Is Moving From Retaliation to Systematic Disassembly (mediadefence.org)

AI demand has reached the machines that determine whether advanced chips work before leaving the factory. Read → The AI Equipment Boom Has Reached the Test Floor