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 May 13.
Tech CEOs Hitch a Ride with Trump to China
Nvidia’s Jensen Huang, Apple’s Tim Cook, Tesla’s Elon Musk and 14 other tech CEOs accompanied President Trump on his trip to Beijing to meet with Chinese President Xi Jinping. Read the Yahoo Finance story.
OpenAI Spins up Standalone Consulting Business
OpenAI launched a standalone consulting business to provide organizations with AI adoption assistance. The venture was seeded with $4 billion from OpenAI and 19 additional investors led by TPG and co-partners Advent, Bain Capital and Brookfield. The OpenAI Deployment Company will use the funding to send teams of forward-deployed engineers into the field and deepen its bench of AI talent via acquisitions, OpenAI said. The launch was accompanied by the acquisition of AI consulting firm Tomoro and its roughly 150 AI engineers and deployment specialists. Read the Channel Dive story.
FCC Gives Conditional OK to EchoStar’s Spectrum Sales to AT&T, SpaceX
The FCC gave its blessing to EchoStar’s $40 billion spectrum sales to AT&T and SpaceX, with the condition that EchoStar establish an escrow account of $2.4 billion. The escrow account is key because EchoStar subsidiary Dish last year stopped paying its network vendors and partners, claiming that because the FCC forced it to sell spectrum and shut down its 5G network, that constituted a “force majeure” event. Tower companies, contractors and other affected entities filed lawsuits against the company for refusing to pay its bills. Read the Fierce Network story.
TD Synnex Signs BCM One as its Partners Turn to Telecom
The world’s largest IT distributor moved deeper into telecom with its newest vendor partner, BCM One. Under the terms of its deal with BCM One, TD Synnex will recruit partners to BCM One’s white label UCaaS platform and sell the provider’s managed voice and data solutions. The move expands TD Synnex’s telco offerings at a time when many of its value-added reseller and managed service provider partners feel pressure to bundle IT and telco services. Read the Channel Dive story.
Greenwatch: Big Tech's Carbon Moves Matter for Telecom
In a roundup of telecom sustainability news, Light Reading looks at Big Tech's power moves, such as natural gas developments involving Google, Meta and Microsoft. Read the Light Reading story.
EchoStar Added Only 16,000 Wireless Subs in Q1
EchoStar’s Boost Mobile and Gen Mobile brands added about 16,000 customers in the first quarter of 2026, far fewer than the 150,000 it added in the same quarter in 2025. The company ended the quarter with 7.53 million wireless subscribers according to its SEC filing. EchoStar said the decrease in wireless net additions primarily resulted from fewer government-subsidized subscriber activations and lower gross new wireless subscriber additions, partly due to its attempts to attract higher-quality subscribers. Read the Fierce Network story.
T-Mobile and Ericsson Test AI-RAN on Live 5G Advanced Network
T-Mobile and Ericsson have reported performance gains from trials of an AI-native radio access network feature running on T-Mobile’s 5G Advanced network. The companies said the feature has moved into large-scale commercial trials using live 5G Advanced network traffic. Compared with legacy rule-based methods, Ericsson’s AI-native Scheduler with Link Adaptation delivered close to a 10% improvement in spectrum efficiency and up to a 15% increase in downlink throughput, in line with earlier tests conducted in smaller geographies. Read the Telecoms News story.
AT&T Business Jumps on Cisco’s ‘Quantum Resilient’ SD-WAN Wagon
AT&T Business tapped Cisco to power a “quantum resilient” SD-WAN service that the carrier plans to launch later this year, a move highlighting growing interest in protecting network infrastructure from potential quantum-related cybersecurity threats. Read the SDxCentral story.
Harmonic Customer Base Diversifies Beyond Comcast and Charter
Comcast and Charter Communications still represent the bulk of Harmonic's broadband business as both move ahead with expansive network upgrades. However, the supplier is also seeing some pick up among other operators that fall outside those top two – what Harmonic calls "rest-of-market" – as those service providers begin to push ahead with upgrade projects. See the Light Reading story.
Red Hat Positions OpenShift Virtualization as a Broader Platform Play
Red Hat Summit 2026 announcements this week put OpenShift Virtualization in a broader strategic role. Red Hat positioned its technology not just as a migration destination for virtual machines, but as part of a unified platform for VMs, containers and hybrid cloud operations. Read the Virtualization Review story.