Groundwave Weekly — May 07, 2026

Iran has spent over 70 consecutive days in near-total digital darkness — the longest sustained nationwide internet shutdown ever recorded — amid reports that the kill switch making it possible was built with Huawei's help. Meanwhile, Crown Castle finished selling off its fiber and small-cell businesses to become a pure tower company, the FCC quietly replaced a 1990s satellite interference rulebook, and Congress is trying to staff a State Department subsea-cable office before the next Baltic cable gets cut. The physical layer of communications — the cables, the spectrum, the filters inside the radios — is being treated as contested territory in a way it hasn't been since the Cold War.

• Starlink v2 Mini batch (SpaceX): Falcon 9 added 29 more v2 Mini satellites from Florida this week, thickening the optical mesh and lane capacity for inter-satellite routing.
• Northern Link Route (Ziply Fiber): A 2,100-mile, fully buried 400-Gig backbone from Hillsboro to Chicago lit end-to-end on April 13 — a deliberately inland alternative to coastal trunk routes.
• 5G-Advanced city rollout (China Telecom Shanghai): Operational 5G-A with Integrated Sensing and Communications and deep network slicing for port automation — radios that double as sensors.
• Tunable RF Filters SBIR (DPA26BZ01-NV007) (DARPA): Pre-released May 6, 2026, soliciting wideband tunable filters for contested-spectrum EW environments; window opens May 27, 2026.
• Capacity Holder Report (DA-26-197) (FCC): New filing regime requiring cable landing licensees to disclose ownership, capacity, and fiber-pair sales — the regulatory plumbing for cable visibility.

The current near-total blackout began February 28 amid the U.S.-Israeli strikes, with NetBlocks measuring connectivity at roughly 1% of ordinary levels during the shutdown and holding there through March and April. Iran's own communications minister put the cost at $35.7 million per day; NetBlocks puts it as high as $37 million per day; Iranian analyst Afshin Kolahi estimates the indirect toll closer to $70–80 million daily. Online sales have collapsed by around 80% since the blackout began, and the Tehran Stock Exchange shed 450,000 index points across a four-day window, according to Iran International's reporting drawn from Iranian government and analyst figures.

Per Iran International, the kill-switch project is being coordinated with Huawei and China, giving Beijing a live wartime test environment for sovereign-internet architecture and giving Tehran a system other authoritarian governments will study and license. Iran has also moved against Starlink — the satellite service that initially countered the shutdown — with new legislation reportedly authorizing prison sentences up to 10 years, or in some cases execution, for terminal users. Diaspora campaigners have launched #DirectToCellForIran, asking SpaceX to activate satellite-to-smartphone service that would bypass ground infrastructure entirely.

The signal to watch is whether Starlink Direct-to-Cell gets activated in Iran. If it does, expect coordinated Russian and Chinese pressure at the ITU framing it as an Outer Space Treaty violation — an argument both governments have already made at the UN. If it doesn't, the precedent that wartime internet shutdowns are operationally durable gets cemented.

On April 30 the FCC voted to replace its Equivalent Power Flux Density regime — late-1990s caps on how much power non-geostationary satellites could beam toward Earth, written to protect geostationary incumbents from interference — with a more performance-based framework. The old rules assumed a world where Iridium was the most advanced LEO constellation in existence. The new framework assumes Starlink, Amazon Leo, and whatever comes next.

If this holds, LEO operators get materially more usable capacity per satellite, which compounds Starlink's existing scale advantage and gives Amazon Leo a more forgiving runway to hit its FCC milestone. GEO operators — ViaSat, SES, Hughes — lose a regulatory shield that's protected their business model for two decades. Expect filings from incumbents arguing the new performance metrics undercount real-world interference; expect LEO operators to race to publish compliance demonstrations.

The signal to watch is whether the first round of incumbent challenges focuses on technical methodology or asks for stays on enforcement. Methodology fights mean the framework holds and gets refined. Stay requests mean the GEO operators think they can run out the clock.

On May 1, Crown Castle closed the sale of its Fiber Solutions business to Zayo and its Small Cell business to EQT-backed Arium Networks for roughly $8.5 billion gross, redirecting more than $7 billion to debt reduction and $1 billion to share repurchases. It's now a pure-play U.S. tower REIT.

This is a vote on 5G densification economics, and it's not a flattering one. Small cells and fiber backhaul are the picks-and-shovels of dense urban 5G — the infrastructure that supposedly makes millimeter-wave deployments and private network buildouts work. One of the largest infrastructure owners in the country looked at those assets and concluded they were worth more in someone else's hands. If Zayo can run the fiber business profitably as a focused operator, the lesson is that vertical integration was the problem, not the underlying economics. If Zayo struggles too, the lesson is harder: dense 5G at the urban scale operators have promised may simply not pencil.

Watch Zayo's first full-year guidance under the new perimeter. That's the read on whether this was a portfolio cleanup or a structural admission.

JADC2 — Joint All-Domain Command and Control, the doctrine that says a Navy destroyer, an Air Force F-35, and an Army artillery battery should share targeting data in near-real-time — depends on the Joint Warfighting Cloud Capability, the $9 billion multi-cloud contract awarded to AWS, Google, Microsoft, and Oracle. Per Breaking Defense's reporting on the program one year in, the services are still "testing the waters" while the DoD envisions a JWCC 2.0.

DoD CIO John Sherman has called JWCC "the binding element" for JADC2 and acknowledged adoption requires "a bit of a cultural shift." That's bureaucratic understatement. During Project Convergence exercises, Army and Air Force assets had trouble communicating in any automated way — they were never designed to. No cloud contract resolves systems that were procured to talk to themselves.

The JWCC follow-on competition was scoped to launch in early 2026. That deadline has arrived: if a solicitation drops in Q2, the cloud-for-JADC2 strategy is on track. If the building stays quiet through the summer, the integration problem is deeper than the contract timeline assumed — and the CJADC2 pitch to allies starts looking thin.

Signals Research Group benchmarked Ericsson and 1Finity small-cell radios inside AT&T's Open RAN deployment in Dallas and found them performing "largely the same," according to Light Reading's coverage. That's not a dramatic finding. It's the finding operators have been waiting years for.

Open RAN — the push to make radio access networks mix-and-match across vendors instead of locked into one supplier — has spent most of its existence as a policy slogan. The Dallas benchmark is the first dateable, public field result showing two vendors' radios performing equivalently in a live carrier network. If AT&T expands these trials into wider deployments without operational complexity eroding the economics, Open RAN becomes a template instead of a thesis.

The signal to watch is whether AT&T announces a procurement decision based on these benchmarks — buying from 1Finity at scale, not just testing. That would be the first time a Tier 1 U.S. carrier put real money on Open RAN parity.

Space-BACN — DARPA's Space-Based Adaptive Communications Node — is winding down at the agency and being handed to the Defense Innovation Unit for an on-orbit pathfinder, per Breaking Defense. The program's goal is a universal optical inter-satellite link terminal that can bridge constellations speaking different optical "languages" — the satellite equivalent of a router that handles every packet format.

If this reaches orbit and works, the U.S. military gets a path to a real mesh network across commercial and government constellations — Starlink, Iridium, SDA's Transport Layer, classified systems — without forcing everyone onto a single proprietary standard. That's the architecture that makes JADC2 actually work in a contested space environment. If it stalls in DIU's transition phase, the alternative is what we have now: stovepiped constellations and bespoke gateways.

Watch for DIU's prototype contracting timeline. A solicitation in 2026 means architecture; a 2027 slip means demos.

Romania's Transelectrica and Georgian State Electrosystem signed a Memorandum of Understanding in Bucharest advancing the Black Sea Submarine Cable Project — a 1,195 km link from Anaklia (Georgia) to Constanta (Romania), 1,100 km of it underwater, carrying 500 kV HVDC at 1,000–1,500 MW capacity, per Submarine Networks. The headline is energy. The buried detail is that a fiber-optic submarine cable will be laid alongside the electric cable, strengthening internet connectivity between the Caucasus and the EU.

This is a new internet route that bypasses Russian territory entirely. The Final Investment Decision was originally scoped for around April 2026, per the Georgia-Romania feasibility study. That window is now — either the FID lands in the next few weeks or the project slips, and which it is will be the most consequential signal for Caucasus connectivity in years. Construction at 2,000-meter depths for roughly 700 km of the route makes the cable physically harder to repair if compromised, which cuts both ways: harder to sabotage, harder to fix.

Watch for the FID announcement. Anything past Q3 2026 means financing or routing got complicated.

A nation of 90 million people running at 1% bandwidth, a tower REIT cashing out of the densification dream, and a DARPA office quietly asking small businesses to invent a radio filter that can dodge a Russian jammer in real time. Reports suggest Tehran is weighing Huawei's kill‑switch maintenance contract against the day's $37 million loss, and the math still works for the people who chose it.

Stay grounded.

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