Groundwave Weekly — Jul 05, 2026

The through-line this week is what happens when communications infrastructure stops being neutral and starts being contested territory. Iran's internet came back after the longest nationwide shutdown ever recorded — but what returned is a tiered, filtered valve rather than a free network. Germany finally showed its hand on Huawei, and the real fight turns out to be in the radio towers, not the core. Meanwhile, two militaries are jamming GPS across the Caribbean and grounding civilian planes in the process, and Washington quietly voted to nationalize the hardware inside every submarine cable landing station. None of these are loud, but together they describe a nervous system being carved up into zones of trust and control.

The hardest part of Iran's internet story isn't the 88-day blackout. It's what the blackout revealed about the machinery underneath.

NetBlocks confirmed a partial restoration on day 88 of the shutdown, calling it the longest nationwide internet shutdown in modern history, while flagging it was unclear whether the restoration would hold. At its peak on May 26, Cloudflare Radar data showed traffic returning to only 40% of the maximum activity observed so far in 2026. As of this week, the partial restoration is holding — but the architecture that enabled the shutdown isn't being dismantled.

Two technical details make this a governance story, not a recovery story. First, Cloudflare's analysis notes that IPv4 addresses were never removed from global routing tables even as actual traffic vanished — a fingerprint of application filtering or whitelisting rather than a blunt route withdrawal. Iran didn't unplug from the internet; it built a valve it can open partway. Second, during the blackout, Iran's Supreme National Security Council reportedly approved a tiered "Internet Pro" system granting less-restricted access to Chamber of Commerce members, tech companies, and select business sectors — while ordinary citizens stayed cut off. Reports indicate promotional messages are still circulating, encouraging eligible groups to buy packages with fewer restrictions.

If this succeeds as policy, Iran demonstrates a repeatable model: connectivity as a licensed privilege, priced and provisioned by user category. The observable signal is whether NetBlocks measurements settle well below pre-war baselines. If they do, the tiered architecture has consolidated from wartime emergency into permanent design — and other governments now have a working blueprint.

The deadline everyone's watching is December 31, 2026. Germany's three big carriers will almost certainly hit it — because the part they have to fix was already mostly fixed.

German law requires operators to strip Huawei from the network "core" — the software brain — by year's end. But Deutsche Telekom, Telefónica, and Vodafone had largely done that already, and regulators long treated the radio access network (RAN — the towers and base stations your phone actually talks to) as non-critical. Light Reading reports Huawei still accounts for roughly 60% of Germany's RAN, present in all three networks. That's where the real reckoning lives, and the deadline for the RAN runs to 2029.

Here's the shift: Germany's federal network regulator, the Bundesnetzagentur, appears to have changed its mind. A recent consultation paper extends the definition of "critical" to cover the gNodeB — the technical name for a 5G base station — stating that all its functions are now classified as critical. Per Germany's formal ban plan reporting, Strand Consult found 59% of German 5G RAN deployed at the end of 2022 came from Chinese vendors. Ripping that out is expensive, slow, and politically radioactive — Germany exports roughly €90 billion to China each year, and retaliation is a live fear.

If Berlin holds the RAN line, it validates the Western rip-and-replace timeline. If Deutsche Telekom formally requests a RAN extension — the signal to watch — the whole coordinated European effort quietly becomes "when we can" rather than "by when."

Your next flight to San Juan or Trinidad might land on radar and visual landmarks, because two militaries who aren't technically at war are jamming the GPS overhead.

An escalating standoff between the United States and Venezuela has both sides jamming satellite navigation signals across the Caribbean to guard against drone and precision-munition attacks. Per the San Juan Daily Star, analysis of Stanford University data shows U.S. warships jamming GPS in their vicinity; Spire Global data shows Venezuela's armed forces jamming around military bases, oil refineries, and power plants. "It is defensive in nature," said Logan Scott, a radio-frequency expert who helped build the world's first digital GPS receivers — but he added that the two adversaries using identical tactics amplifies the range and intensity of the interference.

The civilian cost is concrete. Pilots report intermittent GPS loss, in some cases falling back to radar or visual landmarks — navigation methods modern aviation was built to leave behind. Safe Airspace warns jamming and spoofing may reach 250 nautical miles from the source. The New York Times front-paged the same pattern, reinforcing that this is a standing electronic-warfare environment, not a glitch.

This is what spectrum warfare looks like when it bleeds into shared infrastructure — and a preview of contested-environment navigation in any conflict near a major shipping lane. The signal to watch: if the FAA expands its Caribbean GPS-degraded zone via formal NOTAM (Notice to Air Missions), civilian aviation has become a standing casualty of an undeclared standoff.

The Caribbean story has a military mirror image, and War on the Rocks put it in public view this week: the U.S. military is dangerously dependent on the same GPS signals it's degrading.

Positioning, navigation, and timing (PNT) is the invisible backbone of modern warfare. GPS guides munitions, synchronizes encrypted radios, and timestamps every transaction across a military network. When it's denied, the whole kill chain slows down. The uncomfortable part the essay makes explicit: the U.S. built decades of capability on the assumption GPS would always be there, and the fallback options — inertial navigation, eLoran, underwater acoustic positioning, signals of opportunity — are fragmented across services and don't interoperate. The gap isn't inventing alternatives; it's integrating them so a platform can switch seamlessly when one is jammed.

There's a communications dimension that gets missed: timing signals derived from GPS are embedded in everything from 5G base-station synchronization to encrypted military radio. Jam GPS and you don't just lose position — you can desynchronize the entire tactical comms stack. The Caribbean is a live, low-intensity test of exactly that scenario.

If the doctrine community succeeds in forcing the procurement community's hand, alternative-PNT funding accelerates. The signal to watch: a DARPA or NTIA solicitation on resilient PNT in the coming weeks — the kind of thing that turns a policy-journal argument into a line item.

Almost nobody outside the subsea world noticed, but at its June 25 open meeting the FCC voted unanimously, 3-0, on a Second Report and Order overhauling the rules for the submarine fiber cables that carry roughly 99% of transcontinental internet, financial, and AI traffic.

The real move, per Submarine Networks' analysis of the order, is that the FCC extended its licensing authority to Submarine Line Terminal Equipment (SLTE) — the onshore hardware inside landing stations that converts deep-sea optical light into terrestrial signals. Modern "open cable" architectures let multiple third parties own dark fiber strands and install their own SLTE, and the FCC has now identified those endpoints as prime targets for interception, sabotage, or espionage. Huawei, ZTE, and HMN Tech (formerly Huawei Marine) are barred from any new U.S.-landing cable; legacy gear can't be upgraded; and any project with a Chinese investor over even a small stake faces presumptive disqualification. A July 1 draft pushes further, requiring new applicants to certify they won't use Covered List equipment.

If this holds, trusted U.S. firms get vastly faster deployment timelines — but the pool of eligible hardware suppliers shrinks, and analysts are watching for near-term bottlenecks as mixed-vendor consortia scramble to comply. The tell that this is settled policy rather than a fight: it passed with bipartisan unanimity. Infrastructure decoupling from China is now the least controversial thing in the room.

This week: Iran reopened the internet like a bartender pouring measured shots to paying regulars, Germany discovered the scary part of Huawei was in the towers all along, and the U.S. Navy jammed the Caribbean so thoroughly that pilots are squinting for landmarks like it's 1955. The best detail is buried at the bottom — the FCC just annexed the hardware closet inside every submarine cable landing station, and it did so with such total bipartisan agreement that not one of three commissioners flinched, which is either reassuring or the quietest thing about a decoupling this big that you'll read all year. The nervous system is being partitioned, and everyone's pretending it's routine maintenance.

Forward this to the one person you know who actually understands why a base station timing signal matters — they'll thank you, and they don't have many people to talk to about it.

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