Essential Telco Channel News for Week of March 23

The content team at Channel Partners tracks stories of interest to the technology advisor and wider channel communities. Anyone selling communication and connectivity solutions will want to stay abreast of these developing stories or catch up on ones they have missed. All links are valid as of March 25.

Telecom: bright spot in the family budget

Data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics shows telecommunications is the largest source of consumer price relief in US household budgets. Unlike groceries, electricity, car insurance and other household necessities, the cost of wireless service has gone down. The BLS wireless telephone services index shows a 10.4% decline from 2017 to 2025, while overall consumer prices rose 33.1%. Read the Light Reading story.

Zillow for the Channel? New Platform Wants to Shake up the TSD Market

Consulting firm The Channel Standard launched its Channel Companion platform, aiming to give technology advisor firms unbiased vendor recommendations for their customer deals, and lower barriers to entry for vendors. Partners have historically discovered and vetted suppliers through the TSD-run digital platforms. However, as suppliers flock to the ecosystem and TSDs curate their own line cards, keeping up with more than 750 vendors is growing complicated for TAs. Read the Channel Dive story.

More! More! More! Tech Workers Max Out Their AI Use

At a number of companies, employees compete on leaderboards to show how much A.I. they’re using. They’re racking up big bills along the way. For instance, an OpenAI engineer processed 210 billion “tokens” — enough text to fill Wikipedia 33 times — through the company’s artificial intelligence models over the last week. At Anthropic, a single user of the company’s A.I. coding system, Claude Code, racked up a bill of more than $150,000 in a month. Read the New York Times story.

Data Center Buildouts Slowed in Late 2025

The North American data center building boom showed signs of a slowdown for the first time in six years during the second half of 2025, according to CBRE research. Despite an ongoing surge in hyperscaler infrastructure spending, capacity under construction fell nearly 6% year over year, the analyst firm found. Read the Channel Dive story.

U.S. Federal AI Framework Deemed Aspirational, Noncommittal

The Trump Administration published its latest executive order last week: the National Policy Framework for Artificial Intelligence. It's a light-touch federal regulatory approach that relies on congressional measures and puts the onus on federal agencies to review state laws, enforce federal policy and develop standards for AI. Read the TechTarget story.

Amazon Leo Ramps up ‘Aggressive’ Launch Schedule for Commercial Service

Amazon Leo is pursuing a “very aggressive” launch schedule ahead of plans to commercially launch service later this year and already has most of its initial ground stations in place, Amazon's Leo's VP of Business Chris Weber said in a SAT Show 2026 keynote. The company has more than 200 low-earth orbit (LEO) satellites in orbit. Weber said Amazon made 11 rocket launches since April 2025 and expects to double that total over the next year. Read the Fierce Network story.

U.S. Blocks Overseas Router Makers for National Security

It's a move that will hit harder than industry watchers had expected, in that it affects both foreign and U.S.-based manufacturers. In the case of the latter, U.S. companies that put together consumer-grade routers in plants overseas – which most of them do – will also be affected. There is, of course, a loophole. The FCC is accomplishing this ban by adding all consumer-grade routers produced in foreign countries to its Covered List, a list of communications equipment and services that are deemed to pose an unacceptable risk to national security. Read the Telecoms.com story.

Bezos' Blue Origin Enters Data Center Space Race

Blue Origin, Jeff Bezos' maker of rockets and lunar landers, wants to build an orbital data center platform comprising 51,600 satellites. Others pursuing this concept include SpaceX, Google and Nvidia-backed Starcloud. Blue Originpreviously aimed at the enterprise market with a "TeraWave" platform that will comprise thousands of low Earth orbit (LEO) and medium Earth orbit (MEO) satellites. However, Blue Origin's initial data center aims appear to be dwarfed by those of SpaceX, which has filed a plan to develop an orbital data center platform underpinned by "up to" 1 million satellites. See the Light Reading story.

Nvidia thinks it has dethroned Cisco as the world's biggest networking company

One thing that may have been in Nvidia’s last fiscal quarter was its $11 billion in networking revenue. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang didn’t overlook that number, however. “We're now the largest networking company in the world,” Huang said during GTC last week. While Nvidia focused on Infiniband over Ethernet until 2022, intense demand for its Ethernet has brought sales up to around the same level as Infiniband. Read the SDxCentral story.