What’s up with… Verizon, 5G in Germany, FCC

• Verizon’s cost-cutting programme to cost up to $1.8bn in Q4
• Germany has to re-run its 2019 5G spectrum auction
• US regulator rescinds network security ruling

In today’s industry news roundup: Verizon shares the expected near-term cost of cutting more than 13,000 jobs; Germany’s network agency is forced to re-run its 5G auction following a failed legal appeal; the FCC scraps a security ruling made after the Salt Typhoon attacks on US telcos; and much more!

Following the internal memo sent by CEO Dan Schulman to announce major job cuts at Verizon, the US telco has filed an update with the US financial regulator the Securities & Exchange Commission (SEC) to note that it “expects to record a severance charge in the range of $1.6bn to $1.8bn in the fourth quarter of 2025 in connection with its plans to reduce its workforce as it implements its previously announced plan to reduce its cost structure.” It added: “The workforce reduction will include the elimination of over 13,000 positions, with over 80% of the affected employees exiting the business in December 2025. Verizon also expects that its cost-reduction efforts will include a significant reduction in outsourced, contracted and other outside labor expense.” Schulman, who was appointed unexpectedly as Verizon’s CEO in early October, stated clearly in his initial comments as the new head honcho that he was planning to take an axe to the operator’s cost base. “Verizon is at a critical juncture. We have a clear opportunity to redefine our trajectory, by growing our market share across all segments of the market, while delivering meaningful growth in our key financial metrics. We are going to maximise our value propositions, reduce our cost to serve and optimise our capital allocation to delight our customers, and deliver sustainable long-term growth for our shareholders,” he commented. And he’s doing exactly that. Verizon will discover in 2026 what impact the new cost-cutting programme will have on its operations. 

Following the loss of a legal appeal at the Federal Administrative Court, Germany’s Federal Network Agency (the Bundesnetzagentur, or BNetzA) will have to rerun the country’s 5G spectrum auction process, which was first held in 2019 and which resulted in licence awards to Deutsche Telekom, Vodafone and Telefónica. “The Federal Network Agency will promptly restart the 5G frequency allocation process to ensure legal clarity and planning certainty for companies as quickly as possible,” stated Klaus Müller, BNetzA’s president in this announcement (in German). “The Federal Network Agency expects the mobile networks in Germany to continue to be expanded rapidly. Both the 5G frequency allocation decision and the existing frequency allocations to companies remain valid as long as they are not revoked or amended by the Federal Network Agency,” he added. BNetzA noted that the rules for allocating frequencies in the 2GHz and 3.6GHz spectrum bands “are to be reconsidered. The process will be objective, transparent and non-discriminatory. After evaluating the written justification from the Federal Administrative Court, the Federal Network Agency will resume the proceedings.” As this Reuters report from last year notes, the original ruling by the Cologne Administrative Court found that the agency had been “biased” and “unlawfully influenced” by Germany’s ministry for transport and digital infrastructure when it set up and conducted the 2019 auction.  

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has rescinded a network security declaratory ruling made at the beginning of the year that was introduced by the US telecom regulator’s previous chairperson, Jessica Rosenworcel, in the wake of the cybersecurity attacks perpetrated by the Salt Typhoon hacking group that targeted US telcos. You can read about that declaratory ruling, and what it required US telcos to do to protect their infrastructure, in this article from January. The current FCC commissioners, led by Brendan Carr, though, didn’t think much of that ruling: They noted, in this announcement, that the ruling was “unlawful and ineffective” and that it had also decided to withdraw an accompanying NPRM (notice of proposed rulemaking) based on “flawed legal analysis”, which resulted in “ineffective cybersecurity requirements”. The decision to revoke the January decisions “follows months-long engagement with communications service providers where they have demonstrated a strengthened cybersecurity posture following Salt Typhoon. Foreign adversaries and other bad actors have repeatedly launched cyberattacks targeting American communications networks. Over the past several months, the agency has engaged with providers that have agreed to take ‘extensive, urgent and coordinated efforts to mitigate operational risks, protect consumers and preserve national security interests against the range of cyberattacks that target their networks.  Today’s action reinforces this commitment going forward.” The FCC added: “Since January, the commission has taken a series of actions to harden communications networks and improve their security posture to enhance the agency’s investigative process into communications network outages that result from cyber incidents.  The commission established a Council on National Security to facilitate the commission’s engagement with national security partners and mitigate America’s vulnerabilities to cyberattacks, espionage and surveillance by foreign adversaries.  It has also adopted targeted rules to address the greatest cybersecurity risks to critical communications infrastructure without imposing inflexible and ambiguous requirements, for example requiring submarine cable licensees to create and implement cybersecurity risk management plans. The FCC has also adopted rules to ban ‘bad labs’ in the FCC’s equipment authorisation programme to ensure no such entities are subject to untrustworthy actors that pose a risk to national security.” Now America can breathe easy. 

As part of its fourth round of funding, the European Union’s Connecting Europe Facility (CEF) Digital programme has awarded €389m to 56 projects “for the rollout of safe and resilient high-performance digital backbone networks, 5G large-scale pilots for transport corridors and for smart communities and the deployment of secure quantum communication infrastructure (EuroQCI),” the European Commission (EC) has announced. “These projects are directly contributing to the EU’s ambitions to develop competitive and resilient advanced connectivity infrastructure – key to unlocking benefits of the digital revolution for citizens and companies across Europe,” the EC added. The projects selected will deliver: Backbone connectivity for digital Global Gateways, including terrestrial and submarine cables within the EU and with third countries, with all new projects required to integrate ‘smart’ technologies that act as early warning systems of potential threats; 5G large-scale pilots that will see motorways and railways along the cross-border segments of the TEN-T transport corridors (5G coverage along transport corridors) equipped with standalone 5G networks, and edge cloud infrastructure deployed for healthcare, education, agriculture, tourism, port and airport logistics, manufacturing and more; and EuroQCI, including cross-border fibre cables between national quantum communication networks of EU member states, and/or satellite ground-station linking their EuroQCI’s terrestrial segment with the pan-European space constellation (Iris2). The EU's financial contribution “comes in the form of grants with different co-financing rates, ranging from 30% to 75% of the projects’ total cost,” noted the EC, which has €1.5bn in the CEF Digital pot for the period 2021-27: Hundreds of millions of euros have already been awarded. “Future calls will follow over the next two years, in line with the latest policy developments, including the Recommendation on the Security and Resilience of Submarine Cable Infrastructures and the EU Action Plan on Cable Security,” the EC added. 

Fujitsu’s telecom technology subsidiary, 1Finity, has teamed up with Accton Technology’s Edgecore Networks and datacentre infrastructure software platform specialist Liqid to “develop and deliver a cutting-edge datacentre solution that enables seamless all-photonic network connectivity across long distances from several kilometres to several hundred kilometres.” The joint solution “is designed to support wide-area resource sharing via software-defined composable infrastructure solutions, empowering datacentres to dynamically scale up and scale out, and optimise infrastructure, including critical resources, such as GPUs, FPGAs, memory, and storage, across geographically distributed environments.” Read more. 

– The staff, TelecomTV