Groundwave Weekly — Jun 25, 2026

This was a week about who controls the signal — and increasingly, the answer is determined by force or by fiat, not by engineering. Russia built a $1.5 million system to blind Starlink from the sky, and Ukraine damaged two of them with drones; Iran has now spent roughly a third of 2026 in a near-total internet blackout that its own officials post through; and Light Reading confirmed the quiet truth that U.S. sanctions never managed to dull Huawei's 5G hardware edge. The common thread running through orbit, seabed, and spectrum: resilience is becoming the product, not the feature.

• T-Mobile 5G Advanced (T-Mobile US): the first nationwide 5G Advanced network in the U.S., built on a fully standalone 5G core enabling carrier aggregation and network slicing.
• Protected Tactical SATCOM–Global (PTS-G) (U.S. Space Force / Viasat / Intelsat): $437.7M for the first two operational jam-resistant GEO spacecraft using the Protected Tactical Waveform in X-band and military Ka-band.
• AWS-3 Auction 113 (FCC): mid-band spectrum auction closed June 23 with more than $3.5 billion in winning bids across the 1695–1710, 1755–1780, and 2155–2180 MHz bands.
• Qualcomm Release-19-ready modem-RF architecture (Qualcomm): the industry's first 3GPP Release 19-ready modem-RF platform, positioned as the bridge to 6G commercial deployment targeted for 2029.
• MANTRAS solicitation (DARPA): an SBIR XL topic for manufacturable, low-power Rydberg-atom RF sensors, opened June 24 with proposals due July 22.

The most interesting thing about Russia's new Starlink jammer isn't that it exists — it's how it works, and why it keeps failing.

Russia's "Volna Kupol Garant" (Wave Dome Guarantor), built by Russkiy Kupol in occupied Crimea, doesn't go after the dishes on the ground. It attacks the uplink — the path from Ukrainian terminals to the satellites overhead. Starlink terminals transmit in the 14–14.5 GHz band, split into eight channels; the system uses eight dish antennas, one per channel, each blasting interference straight up at a satellite as it passes, trying to deafen its receiver so it can't hear legitimate Ukrainian users below. The catch: its range covers only about 20 square kilometers.

Here's why that fails. SpaceX detects channel interference quickly, and allied signals-intelligence satellites can pinpoint the jammer's loud emissions — which lets Ukraine find and damage them with drones. One complex was damaged in occupied Kerch on June 23; a second went days earlier. Against a constellation of more than 10,000 satellites, with dozens potentially in view of any terminal at once, jamming one bird at a time over 20 square kilometers is a math problem Russia hasn't solved.

What to watch: whether Russia scales deployment faster than Ukraine destroys it. The leading indicator is the drone-strike-to-jammer ratio — if it slips below one, the calculus changes.

Ninety million people went dark so the regime's influencers could post brunch photos.

Iran's nationwide blackout — now in its third iteration since the 12-day war began — has left ordinary access to the global internet at roughly one percent. The country has spent about a third of 2026 offline, according to NetBlocks.

The architecture is the story. International connectivity is severed, but regime figures and white-listed influencers post freely while the population goes dark. NetBlocks director Alp Toker noted that because Iran's officials have practiced this for a decade, they're more proficient at it than other governments. IranWire pegs the cost at $35.7 million per day — meaning the cumulative toll since late February is now approaching $4 billion. Diaspora campaigners have appealed to Elon Musk to switch on Starlink Direct-to-Cell, even as a trial.

Three shutdowns in roughly four months is no longer crisis response — it's a repeatable operational capability, tested under wartime conditions and demonstrably reliable from the regime's point of view. The whitelist model is the exportable product, and the proof-of-concept has now run three times in a single conflict.

What to watch: the first non-Iranian government to cite this architecture in a domestic "network sovereignty" document. That's the export moment.

Cut the chips, degrade the products, lose the market. That was the theory. Light Reading reported this week that it didn't hold for 5G radio gear.

Per buyer-side sources, the measures haven't noticeably hurt product quality. In massive MIMO — the advanced multi-antenna technology at the heart of 5G capacity — Huawei's top antennas remain "a generation ahead" of Ericsson's best, at a fraction of the weight. HiSilicon, Huawei's chip-design arm, appears outside U.S. controls, as do the power amplifiers in its radios, which owe their light weight partly to gallium nitride — an energy-efficient alternative to silicon. Ericsson CEO Börje Ekholm told analysts he expects to lose deals, citing "sharply increased competition from Chinese vendors in Europe and Latin America."

Germany's government imposed a 5G-core ban beyond December 2026 — largely moot, since Deutsche Telekom, Telefónica, and Vodafone already pulled the core gear. The RAN is the next fight, and it's far from settled.

The sanctions bifurcated the global market; they did not degrade the technology. Watch whether Germany extends its end-of-2026 deadline — if it does, every European holdout gets cover, and Beijing cites it at every ITU forum for years.

The abstract debate over Huawei removal just got a price tag — and it won't be the last.

Denmark is paying roughly €12 million in compensation tied to pulling Huawei 5G equipment. The Danish specifics matter less than the signal: rip-and-replace isn't free, and the bill lands on operators and, ultimately, governments. The harder problem is the RAN — the physical antennas on towers. In Germany, Huawei gear sits at about half of all 5G sites, and a full German RAN removal runs into the billions no one has budgeted.

The Denmark figure is the canary — a concrete number every finance ministry can now wave in front of its security ministers. Watch whether the EU's Cybersecurity Act toughening, which would make eviction mandatory, advances to a formal vote in the second half of 2026.

If you care about military networking, the interesting part isn't that the Pentagon bought satellites — it's that it bought a very specific kind: ones built to keep talking when someone is actively trying to silence them.

On June 9, the U.S. Space Force awarded Viasat and Intelsat a combined $437.7 million for the first two operational spacecraft in its Protected Tactical SATCOM–Global program. These go to geosynchronous orbit and use the Protected Tactical Waveform for jam resistance, operating in X-band and military Ka-band — the bands the U.S. military uses to move high-value traffic when the spectrum gets ugly.

This is also a quiet admission that low-Earth-orbit constellations aren't the whole answer. The Pentagon still wants a protected layer in GEO because endurance, coverage, and anti-jam performance outrank fashion. Resilience is becoming the product, not the feature. Watch for follow-on awards and how tightly PTS-G knits into the broader data-transport architecture — that tells you whether GEO is a hedge or a pillar.

Most people never think about submarine cables until one breaks. Regulators are thinking about them now because the harder problem isn't a broken cable — it's a compromised one.

The FCC adopted new submarine-cable security measures aimed at speeding buildouts while tightening scrutiny of foreign-adversary equipment. The commission counts more than 90 licensed submarine cable systems and millions of Gbps of active and planned capacity. The new rules create a presumption against certain foreign-adversary ownership structures and add pressure on suspect equipment in cable systems and landing stations — extending obligations toward the owners of the submarine line terminal equipment (SLTE) that lights the cable, not just the cable operators.

That matters because hyperscalers and carriers have long treated cable routes as capex-and-engineering questions; Washington now treats them as strategic dependencies. The seabed is being regulated like a frontline. Watch the comment fights and compliance costs — if operators conclude they may have to rip out certain gear, route planning and vendor selection change fast.

Ground-based GPS jamming is a known nuisance. Jamming from orbit is something else — and researchers just confirmed it's happening.

On dozens of occasions since 2019, monitoring stations have logged simultaneous GPS interference across Europe, Canada, and Greenland — incidents lasting seconds and appearing to come from a single source. The geographic footprint pointed to space, and a team from the University of Texas at Austin and Stanford has now identified the likely culprit: three Russian early-warning satellites of the Edinaya Kosmicheskaya Sistema (EKS) in high "Molniya" orbits, designed to detect missile launches. The first EKS satellites launched in 2019 — the same year the disruptions began. The signals interfere with GPS frequencies, whether by intent or accident.

As one researcher put it, "space-based interferers are of special concern given their potential for vast geographic reach." You can't shoot down a satellite the way Ukraine damages a Volna Kupol Garant — which makes orbital jamming categorically harder to counter, and ties directly to the GPS-denied navigation problem the Pentagon has no easy fix for.

Picture it: a $1.5 million Russian jammer pointing eight dishes at the sky like a confused sunflower, drone-struck twice in a fortnight; ninety million Iranians refreshing a dead browser while the regime's influencers post brunch photos; and a venture firm cosplaying as the Naval War College in a 12,000-word memo about space. The sanctions were supposed to make Huawei's antennas worse — instead they're a generation ahead and lighter, which is either a lesson in gallium nitride or a lesson in wishful policy, and nobody in Washington seems eager to say which. Stay sharp out there.

Forward this to the spectrum lawyer in your life who hasn't yet noticed the FCC now owns the seabed too.

The Army's new cheap-interceptor program is a spectrum story in disguise — counter-drone EW runs on the same RF bands as tactical comms, and every new jammer is one more interference source your radios have to survive. Read → The Army launches a cheap interceptor program

Washington is starting to build for a world where today's encryption is broken — and post-quantum readiness just moved from strategy memo to contractual requirement for Pentagon cloud providers. Read → Washington starts building for a world where today's encryption is broken