Lyceum News Desk · May 4, 2026

Groundwave Weekly — May 4, 2026

Groundwave Weekly

Week of May 4, 2026

The Big Picture

Iran's internet blackout crossed 65 days this week, making it the longest nationwide disconnection ever recorded — and the architecture being built underneath it is starting to look permanent. Meanwhile, the FCC quietly rewrote a satellite power rule that had been governing LEO broadband since the dial-up era, Congress introduced legislation to treat submarine cables like military assets, and AT&T's Open RAN experiment finally got a real benchmark in Dallas. Three different policy tracks — cable security, drone spectrum, satellite power — are converging on the same uncomfortable question: who controls the physical layer when things go wrong?

What Just Shipped

Verizon 5G Private Network with Nvidia Enterprise AI (Verizon + Nvidia): Lets private 5G customers run compute-intensive AI workloads, including large language models, on the edge of Verizon's network rather than backhauling to a central cloud.
U.S. Carrier Network APIs (AT&T, T-Mobile, Verizon): The first U.S. advanced network APIs for business customers, aimed at application-layer security and combating communications fraud.
Cellular LPWAN crosses 1 billion connections (3GPP ecosystem): NB-IoT and LTE-M deployments hit one billion worldwide cellular low-power IoT connections at end of 2025 — a quiet maturity milestone for massive IoT on existing 4G/5G spectrum.
Anduril Lattice mesh networking (Anduril): Replacing legacy military C2 systems with a resilient mesh network for sensor-to-shooter linking and rapid integration of new platforms.
BSNL + Echelon Edge private 5G for coal mining (BSNL): Sub-6 GHz private 5G deployed underground for IoT telemetry, predictive maintenance, and remote-operated equipment in Indian coal operations.

This Week's Stories

Iran's Internet Has Been Dark for 65 Days — and the IRGC Is Winning the Internal Fight

Iran has now entered the 65th day of near-total internet blackout — the longest nationwide disconnection ever recorded. NetBlocks, which tracks global outages, estimated the first 48 days alone cost the Iranian economy more than $1.8 billion, and the Chamber of Commerce now puts daily losses around $80 million.

The blackout has become a fault line inside the Iranian state itself. The civilian communications ministry wants the internet back; the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps does not, and the IRGC is winning. According to reporting from the Spokesman-Review, top government officials have grown increasingly vocal about their opposition, but their pleas are being overruled by the security services. Access Now documents that connectivity dropped more than 98% after attacks in late February and has not meaningfully recovered.

What's emerging in place of the open internet is something more durable than wartime emergency. After 1,536 hours of blackout, authorities granted special access via "whitelists" to entities close to decision-making circles, and Iran International reports that under a plan approved by the Supreme National Security Council, selected businesses would regain global access while the public stays restricted. Iran is calling this "Internet Pro" — connectivity as a privilege issued by the security state.

If this architecture holds, it becomes a blueprint other authoritarian regimes will copy. The signal to watch is whether the whitelist expands or contracts after any formal ceasefire — expansion means the IRGC has normalized a permanent two-tier internet; contraction would suggest the civilian ministry is winning back ground. So far, every indicator points to expansion.

SpaceX Is Building the Satellite That Makes Today's Starlink Look Like a Prototype

Most Starlink coverage is about subscriber counts. The more important number is what's coming next.

In its 2025 progress report, SpaceX wrote that each next-generation Starlink V3 satellite is "designed to provide over terabit per second of downlink capacity (more than 1,000 Gbps) and over 200 Gbps of uplink capacity to customers on the ground." That's more than 10x the downlink and 24x the uplink of the V2 Mini satellites flying today. SpaceX has also already rolled out Direct to Cell across 22 countries with more than six million monthly users — letting unmodified smartphones connect directly to satellites with no special hardware.

The catch is delivery. V3 satellites are too large for Falcon 9 — they need Starship's payload bay, and Starship is still in test flights. SpaceX President Gwynne Shotwell told staff to expect "maybe 140, 145-ish" Falcon 9 launches this year, which keeps the existing V2 fleet growing but doesn't unlock V3.

If V3 ships, Starlink stops being a rural broadband supplement and becomes a credible alternative to terrestrial cellular at planetary scale — a problem for every mobile operator that just spent the last decade buying mid-band spectrum. If Starship slips another year, the V3 era slips with it, and Amazon Leo, Eutelsat-OneWeb, and AST SpaceMobile get more runway to catch up. Watch for the first operational Starship satellite deployment attempt — that's the trigger.

The FCC Killed a 1990s Speed Limit on LEO Broadband

On April 30, the FCC voted to replace its Equivalent Power Flux Density (EPFD) rules — late-1990s caps on how much power LEO satellites can beam toward Earth, originally written to protect geostationary operators — with a performance-based regime. The Commission's own framing of the order described it as a path to substantial additional capacity for modern constellations, with industry analysts characterizing the practical gain as a multiple-fold increase for some LEO designs.

This is plumbing, but it's the kind of plumbing that decides who builds the next decade of satellite broadband. The old rules were written when "broadband from orbit" was a thought experiment and Iridium was the most advanced constellation in existence. The new regime essentially concedes that incumbents were overprotected and that the rules were throttling Starlink-class systems by design. The winners are anyone building dense, fast LEO networks. The losers are operators whose competitive position relied on a regulation written for a different physics.

Failure mode here is litigation: GEO operators with revenue tied to the old protections have every incentive to fight, and once one legacy protection falls, the rest of the rulebook starts looking negotiable. Watch the petitions for reconsideration and the inevitable court challenges over the next 90 days.

Congress Just Introduced a Bill to Treat Submarine Cables Like Military Assets

Reps. Joe Wilson (R-SC) and Gregory Meeks (D-NY) introduced the bipartisan Strategic Subsea Cables Act of 2026, requiring the State Department to hire at least ten dedicated full-time staff focused on subsea cable security, maintenance, and repair, and mandating expanded diplomatic engagement with allies on undersea infrastructure protection.

The interesting thing isn't the bill itself — it's the transatlantic disagreement it exposes. Finnish intelligence chief Juha Martelius has said publicly there has been "no deliberate Russian state activity" behind Baltic cable damage, with Supo's assessment pointing to Russia's poorly maintained shadow fleet as the cause. U.S. legislators are framing the same incidents as orchestrated sabotage. The threat model you adopt determines the infrastructure you build, and the two models lead to very different policy responses — supply-chain controls and diplomatic enforcement on the U.S. side, maritime accident frameworks on the European side.

The bill is in introduction stage, not enacted. The signal that tells you which way it's going is whether the Senate produces a companion bill before the August recess. If it does, cable security has officially graduated from commercial concern to national security function. If it doesn't, this becomes another well-intentioned proposal that dies in committee while the cables keep getting cut.

JADC2 Gets Its First Self-Updating Command Gateway

Military command-and-control networks have a problem civilian networks solved a decade ago: they can't update themselves in the field. A patch that takes minutes on a commercial cloud takes months of bureaucratic approval inside a classified DoD network.

The first JADC2 — Joint All-Domain Command and Control, the Pentagon program meant to connect every sensor and shooter across every service — gateway has earned a continuous Authority to Operate, meaning it can now push its own software updates without a fresh approval cycle each time. The Senate Armed Services Committee has emphasized that JADC2 is central to U.S. information and decision advantage and must remain a top priority.

This sounds like procurement housekeeping. It isn't. In a contested electromagnetic environment, the ability to ship a fix in hours instead of months is the difference between a network that survives contact with a peer adversary and one that doesn't. The signal to watch is whether continuous ATO gets extended to deployed tactical nodes — that's where it would matter in a Pacific scenario, and it's also where the bureaucratic resistance will be hardest.

AT&T's Open RAN Experiment Finally Got a Real Street Test

Open RAN — the push to make mobile network gear mix-and-match instead of locked to a single vendor — has spent years sounding more like a policy slogan than a working network. Light Reading reported on benchmark testing in Dallas by Signals Research Group, comparing Ericsson radios against 1Finity small cells inside AT&T's multi-vendor Open RAN deployment.

This matters because AT&T's entire modernization plan rests on Open RAN working outside the lab. The carrier has tied itself to a major Ericsson-led rebuild, but the broader bet — lower vendor lock-in, faster upgrades, radio networks that behave more like cloud infrastructure — only pays off if performance and operational discipline survive contact with real traffic.

The Dallas test doesn't settle the argument. It moves the conversation from ideology to measurements, which is itself a small victory after a decade of slideware. The real test is operational friction at national scale: telecom history is full of architectures that looked elegant until field integration, software updates, and fault isolation turned them into expensive anthropology. If AT&T expands its vendor mix more aggressively later this year, Open RAN is becoming architecture. If it doesn't, it stays pilot theater.

The U.S. Just Funded $132M to Pull Pacific Island Nations Off China-Adjacent Cable Routes

According to Submarine Networks' analyst briefing, the U.S. government has committed $132 million for the Marshall Islands and American Samoa to join the Pacific Connect Initiative, with the Republic of the Marshall Islands joining Google's effort to build the IOKWE cable. Total subsea cable investment is expected to reach roughly $13 billion between 2025 and 2027 — nearly double the previous three-year window — but most of that is hyperscaler capacity. This funding is different in character.

This is Washington explicitly subsidizing allied nations to choose American-aligned infrastructure over cable systems with Chinese involvement. Cable routing is becoming statecraft, and the Pacific is the proving ground. The IOKWE cable is the clearest example yet that the U.S. is institutionalizing subsea security beyond supply-chain controls into operational deterrence.

The signal that tells you where this goes next: whether similar packages appear for Pacific Island Forum members not yet in the program. If they do, the U.S. is building a cable-routing alliance. If funding stops at the current footprint, this stays a one-off.

What Most People Missed

Iran's satellite jamming mirrors Russian tactics in Ukraine: Internet rights groups report Iran is using military-grade mobile jammers similar to those Russia has deployed in Ukraine, suggesting tactical sharing between Moscow and Tehran. This is a live test of electronic warfare against civilian satellite infrastructure, not just censorship.
Satellite TV is becoming a smuggling route for information into blacked-out countries: IEEE Spectrum's May issue highlighted techniques for hiding files inside one-way satellite television broadcasts to bypass Iran's blackout. Resilience often comes from repurposing old broadcast infrastructure, not building new apps.
ITU Working Party 4C documents are already carving up WRC-27: Fresh contributions from the U.S. and China cover non-geostationary satellites, incumbent aeronautical systems, and direct satellite-to-phone connectivity — with the 2.3–2.4 GHz, 2.360–2.395 GHz, and 2.120–2.170 GHz bands specifically in study. The standards war is leaking through committee paperwork before the actual conference.
An Alaska fiber deal is quietly an Arctic resilience story: GCI's planned acquisition of Quintillion is being framed explicitly around defense, emergency response, aviation, and government operations in the Arctic. Arctic backhaul is becoming strategic infrastructure, not local plumbing.
NTIA's NG9-1-1 cost estimate is the unfunded crisis nobody is forwarding: A new April 29 study puts the remaining nationwide migration cost for Next Generation 9-1-1 between $5.8 billion and $9.27 billion. America's emergency communications layer is still running on legacy plumbing while every other public service has gone IP-native.
Iran's "Bale" messenger is a state surveillance tool wearing a WhatsApp costume: Built by state-owned Bank Melli Iran, Bale claims 34 million users and is being promoted aggressively during the blackout. A messaging app from a state bank, pushed during a communications shutdown, is not a neutral tool.

What to Watch

If Iran's "Internet Pro" tiered access expands beyond its initial whitelist, the IRGC has successfully normalized a permanent two-tier internet — and the blackout never fully ends, it just becomes the new architecture.
If a Senate companion bill to the Strategic Subsea Cables Act appears before the August recess, cable security has officially graduated from commercial concern to national security function — and equipment certification scrambles begin.
If SpaceX files for upper C-band terrestrial spectrum in the coming FCC auction, it would be the most consequential spectrum policy development of the year, signaling Starlink intends to compete head-on with AT&T and Verizon on terrestrial mobile.
If continuous ATO gets extended to deployed tactical JADC2 nodes, the Pentagon has solved one of the hardest software-in-the-field problems in military networking — watch C4ISRNET coverage of the next Global Information Dominance Experiment.
If AT&T expands its Open RAN vendor mix after the Dallas benchmark, U.S. carrier modernization is moving from controlled trials to genuine architectural pluralism rather than vendor optionality theater.
If the FCC's drone spectrum reply comments (due May 18) include filings from Verizon, AT&T, and the major defense primes, the Counter-UAS jamming authority fight is about to get expensive — watch ECFS docket 26-74.

The Closer

A messaging app built by an Iranian state-owned bank, an FCC rule older than DSL finally meeting its retirement, and a Falcon 9 booster on its 33rd flight while the satellite it's launching weighs less than the one SpaceX wishes it could send up instead. Iran has discovered that the cheapest way to run a country is to turn it off, which is awkward news for everyone who used to forward this newsletter from Tehran.

Stay grounded.

Forward this to the engineer, policy wonk, or stubborn optimist in your life who still thinks the internet is a neutral utility.

From the Lyceum

Trump declared the Iran war "terminated" on Friday's 60-day War Powers deadline — but every asset stayed in place, and the comms standoff is still very much live. Read → Trump Declares the Iran War "Terminated"

That PDF you opened in December may have been quietly phoning home ever since — the surveillance hiding inside document formats is a comms-layer story your security team needs. Read → The PDF You Opened in December May Have Been Watching You Since