Groundwave Weekly — May 28, 2026

Three things happened this week that, taken together, redraw the map of who controls the network. Iran's 88-day internet blackout ended in a tiered, suspicious partial restoration — the longest nationwide shutdown in modern history concluded not with restoration but with a permanent architecture of control. Amazon Leo crossed 300 satellites on orbit with a hard FCC deadline of July 30 looming and 1,300 satellites still to launch. And underneath the headlines, Huawei's global RAN share quietly reached 31% while Germany's deadline to strip Chinese gear from its 5G core sits six months away with roughly 8% of the work done. Communications infrastructure is geopolitics, and this week the cracks showed in three different places at once.

• Compact Wideband Tunable Filters SBIR (DPA26BZ01-NV007) (DARPA Microsystems Technology Office): Solicitation opened May 27 for power-efficient RF filters that can tune across wide bands without leaking interference — the analog front-end problem underneath every JADC2 ambition.
• Amazon Leo production satellites — 302 on orbit (Amazon): As of April 2026, 302 of the 1,618 satellites required by Amazon's July 30 FCC milestone are in operation, backed by 92 purchased launches across ULA, ArianeGroup, Blue Origin, and SpaceX.
• FCC Auction 113 — AWS-3 spectrum (Federal Communications Commission): Bidding procedures locked; auction opens June 2 with mid-band inventory that will reveal how aggressively carriers still value owned spectrum versus densification.
• NUVEM and SOL submarine cable applications (Skipjack Infrastructure Limited / Google): Bermuda Regulatory Authority published licensing notices May 25; SOL connects Santander, Spain to Flagler Beach, Florida via branches in Bermuda and the Azores.
• Submarine Cable Landing License NPRM (Federal Communications Commission): Proposed rulemaking would require periodic ownership reporting across the 25-year license term, replacing the current regime where annual filings "lack critical ownership and facilities information."

NetBlocks confirmed a partial restoration of internet connectivity in Iran on day 88, after 2,093 hours of near-total isolation from international networks — what the organization called "the longest nationwide internet shutdown in modern history." The restoration followed an order by President Masoud Pezeshkian to begin restoring access, according to Iranian state media. Access Now had documented the blackout's start on February 28 and a connectivity drop of more than 98% — one of the clearest modern cases of a state engineering a near-total disconnect.

"Restored" is doing a lot of work. Kentik measured Iran's traffic at less than 10% of pre-shutdown levels, with the company's Doug Madory describing the flow as "selective." NetBlocks director Alp Toker told Reuters that restoration could take hours, days, or weeks across provinces, and that platforms like WhatsApp remain inaccessible without a VPN. An Iranian programmer told Reuters that many people who ran businesses through Instagram and Telegram "lost everything during this blackout" and "have to start again from far below zero." The blackout caused estimated losses of at least $35 million per day.

The deeper story is architectural. NetBlocks Research Director Isik Mater observed that "historically, each time internet access has been restored after an internet shutdown in Iran, it has come back with heavier restrictions and tighter controls." This wasn't a wartime measure — it was a stress test of Iran's sovereign internet on a population of 90 million. Watch whether connectivity climbs above 50% of pre-shutdown levels within 30 days (real restoration) or stalls below 20% (the class-system internet is now the permanent baseline).

The math has stopped pretending to work. Under Amazon's FCC license, half of the 3,236-satellite constellation must be launched and operating by July 30, 2026, with the remainder by July 30, 2029. As of April 2026, Amazon Leo had 302 production satellites on orbit. The first-phase requirement is roughly 1,618.

Amazon CEO Andy Jassy used the Q1 2026 earnings call to confirm the service — rebranded from Project Kuiper to Amazon Leo last November — will enter the market in mid-2026 to compete directly with Starlink. To get there, Amazon has purchased 92 launches from ULA, ArianeGroup, Blue Origin, and SpaceX at a total cost exceeding $10 billion. That Amazon is paying its direct competitor for launch capacity tells you everything about the regulatory pressure: the FCC deadline is the forcing function behind every Amazon Leo decision right now.

If Amazon files an FCC waiver request before July 30 — and it almost certainly will — the precedent matters more than the relief. A granted waiver tells every future LEO operator that deployment milestones are negotiable. A denied waiver puts the spectrum and orbital rights of a multi-billion-dollar program in play. SpaceX will oppose any waiver aggressively, which means the next chapter of Amazon Leo isn't a launch cadence story — it's a legal fight. Watch the FCC docket through June.

The story Western telecom press tells about Huawei is about bans and rip-and-replace programs. The story Dell'Oro Group's data tells is different. Huawei led the global telecom equipment market in the first half of 2025 with a 31% revenue share, with Nokia at 13% and Ericsson at 12%. Even excluding China, Huawei maintained leadership at 21%, ahead of Nokia (17%) and Ericsson (16%).

Omdia adds the directional detail: although RAN investments declined year-on-year in China, Huawei still increased its global market share "thanks to a more favourable regional mix as well as market share gains in emerging markets." Two parallel 5G ecosystems are hardening — Ericsson and Nokia in one camp, Huawei and ZTE in the other — with the boundary running along geopolitical fault lines. Light Reading's reporting on Europe captures the asymmetry: Germany has ordered its telcos to ensure the 5G core is free of Huawei or ZTE components before the end of 2026 and to replace critical management systems in 5G access and transport networks by the end of 2029.

What changes if Huawei consolidates emerging-market share through 2027? Two upgrade cycles, two standards trajectories, two interoperability regimes — a decoupling that started as security policy becomes an engineering reality. The failure signal is a stall in Huawei's African and Middle Eastern wins; the success signal is the next round of contract announcements running through provincial Chinese operators and into Gulf state procurement. Watch the contract flow, not the press releases.

Ninety FCC-licensed submarine cable systems are either operating or planning to enter service as of March 2026, and the regulatory regime governing all of them is mid-overhaul. Currently, a cable landing license expires 25 years after the in-service date, and the Commission does not routinely require licensees to provide updated ownership information during that term — meaning annual circuit capacity data "lacks critical ownership and facilities information" needed to assess evolving national security concerns, per the Federal Register notice.

The proposed fix requires periodic ownership reporting and gives the FCC cleaner authority to revoke licenses mid-term when ownership changes. Meanwhile, Starfish Infrastructure Inc. has a pending application for the Sol cable — a non-common carrier fiber-optic system connecting the United States to Bermuda, the Azores, and Spain. The same week, Google's Skipjack Infrastructure Limited surfaced in Bermuda's government gazette with applications for NUVEM and SOL cable licenses.

Two separate entities are routing cables through Bermuda and the Azores to Spain, at the same moment the FCC is tightening its ownership disclosure rules. That's either coincidence or signal that the mid-Atlantic corridor is becoming strategically contested infrastructure. If the NPRM finalizes with retroactive ownership disclosure requirements, expect at least one existing licensee to challenge the rule in court — and watch which one, because that tells you whose ownership has changed quietly.

Filings surfaced this week for a new trans-Pacific submarine cable linking the U.S. West Coast to the Philippines and Japan, with Google and Meta listed alongside regional carriers as investors. The route deliberately swings south through the Philippine Sea and east of Okinawa, avoiding the South China Sea's dense but politically exposed cable corridors where Chinese and Vietnamese authorities control repair windows and survey access. Capacity sits in the multi-tens-of-terabits-per-second-per-fiber-pair range, matching the newest hyperscaler builds.

If this lands on schedule, the Philippines stops being a regional spoke and becomes a through-hub for North Asian and U.S. traffic — reshaping peering economics and making its landing stations more attractive for both commercial operators and intelligence services. The cable also becomes a "Plan B" backbone for U.S.–Asia traffic, useful precisely because China's near-seas cable network has accumulated too much political risk to be the only path.

The failure mode is delay through Philippine or Japanese permitting, which would tell you the routing is politically fragile even when the engineering is sound. The filings are primary, but routes and vendors can still shift under pressure. Watch which Chinese diplomatic channels object first.

Read this as a diagnostic document, not a procurement notice. DARPA's Microsystems Technology Office opened SBIR topic DPA26BZ01-NV007 on May 27, seeking "wideband, power-efficient and tunable radio frequency (RF) filter technologies that significantly improve spectrum access and signal integrity for Department of War communications and electronic warfare systems." The solicitation closes June 24. A separate DARPA program page for "Compact Wideband Tunable Filters" frames the work explicitly around communications, signals intelligence, and electronic warfare systems.

When DARPA's Microsystems office puts out a call for tunable RF filters, it's because current military radios can't cleanly tune across wide bands without leaking interference or burning power. This is the physical-layer bottleneck underneath every CJADC2 ambition — the Pentagon's vision of one seamless sensor-to-shooter network. You can have all the software-defined networking you want; if the analog front-end can't switch bands cleanly, the radio is a liability in a contested electromagnetic environment where drones, jammers, datalinks, and emitters are all trying to coexist.

That DARPA is going to small businesses rather than traditional primes suggests the primes haven't solved it. If awardees field demonstrator hardware within 18 months, the tactical radio modernization pipeline gets a new analog foundation; if the topic produces only papers, expect the bottleneck to keep showing up as failed jam-resistance benchmarks in tactical comms exercises through 2028.

The Iran shutdown deserves a second look, because the technical architecture underneath it is the real story. Reports during the blackout indicated that satellite interference stopped immediately following a military strike on Mount Derak near Shiraz, suggesting a jamming tower had been operating in the area. Iran was actively jamming satellite internet signals, not just blocking domestic ISPs. Most users could only access a tightly controlled domestic network of state-approved apps and websites. Independent news, foreign social media, and messaging services remained blocked. IranWire reported preferential access for government, banking, and regime-aligned media while pro-internet advocacy pages stayed offline, and an "Internet Pro" information page was removed mid-restoration.

Under Iranian legislation passed in 2026, users and owners of Starlink terminals face prison terms up to 10 years or even execution. At the UN, Russian and Iranian officials accused Starlink of violating the 1967 Outer Space Treaty. The implementation of the permanent shutdown plan began with the identification and blocking of Starlink terminals.

The infrastructure that enabled an 88-day disconnection of 90 million people is largely intact. The restoration doesn't mean the kill switch was dismantled — it means someone chose not to flip it this week. What's being studied in Beijing, Moscow, and several other capitals right now is exactly which techniques worked, where satellite bypass succeeded, and how long a tiered domestic network can be sustained before economic damage forces a partial reconnect. The 88-day duration wasn't a bug. It was a proof of concept.

A jamming tower outside Shiraz that stopped working the instant a missile found it; 302 Amazon satellites trying to become 1,618 in ninety days; and Google's lawyers filing for cables in a Bermuda gazette no one reads. The kill switch survived the ceasefire, the constellation can't do the math, and somewhere in St. David's a customs officer is about to learn what "Skipjack Infrastructure Limited" means. Until next week.

Forward this to the person you know who still thinks fiber, spectrum, and satellites are three separate industries.

Overnight U.S. strikes damaged Iran's drone control station at Bandar Abbas — directly relevant to everything happening with Iran's communications architecture above. Read → The Ceasefire That Keeps Shooting

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