Analysts Don Kellogg and Roger Entner cover the top telecom news stories of the week, including key updates on satellite tech, recent lawsuit disclosures, industry affordability, and emerging device trends heading into 2027.

00:00 Episode intro

00:25 Joint satellite protocol venture appoints a leader

03:12 Deutsche Telekom lawsuit reveals industry trade secrets

05:50 T-Mobile's regulatory fee hikes and overall affordability

08:44 Key insights from the Toughbook anniversary and launch event in New York

10:16 Episode wrap-up

Tags: telecom, telecommunications, wireless, prepaid, postpaid, cellular phone, Don Kellogg, Roger Entner, satellite, Starlink, T-Mobile, AT&T, Verizon, Elon Musk, Tesla, Paul Roth, Deutsche Telekom, Handelsblatt, Sprint, John Legere, fees, affordability, prices, Dan Schulman, inflation, Panasonic, Toughbook, 5G, devices

Don: Hello and welcome to the 316th episode of The Week with Roger. A conversation between analysts about all things telecom, media and technology by Recon Analytics. I'm Don Kellogg and with me as always is Roger Entner. How you doing, Roger?

Roger: I'm great. How are you?

Don: I'm good. So, we've got some more news on the satellite front, specifically around a joint venture. You want to tell us about it?

Roger: Sure. So, a couple of months ago, just before the Starlink IPO, the three large MNOs in the United States, T-Mobile, AT&T and Verizon announced a joint venture to harmonize how satellite networks are interacting with ground-based networks to standardize that protocol. And the, how can I say, the joint venture was nameless and leaderless. Now, we just had the announcement that the joint venture is no longer leaderless, but it is still nameless.

Don: Or unofficially called the No Elon Club, right?

Roger: Some... well, no, no, no, they're open for everybody to join. This has to be standardized and so, I think what they want is that it is an open standard for everybody rather than an Elon standard. Because I think everybody saw what happened with car chargers, where every EV company had their own standard, which is bad.

Don: Led to fragmentation.

Roger: And because of the great success of Tesla and the hard work of Elon Musk, you have to give him credit. And putting out all these charging stations and everything, the Tesla charger is now the standard. So they have seen this movie before. And here in satellite, Elon Musk is miles ahead of everybody else. Kudos to him. But nobody wants to live in Elon's world. And so they want to have a world where there's an open standard. And so, Paul Roth, former AT&T singular executive, very good executive, he ran for a long time their distribution, he was a prodigy of Ed Whittaker. His father also was a senior AT&T executive way back when. So, really safe hand, very knowledgeable, very skilled. Also knows Washington where I think he will spend a lot of time. Is now running this joint venture on an interim basis. Now, we don't know if he will be an interim CEO, just like Steve Jobs was an interim CEO or not. But at least now this joint venture has a senior career executive that is trusted and known in the industry. So, congratulations to Paul. I know Paul and I have a very high opinion of him. Good man.

Don: Very good man. Nice guy. Too bad he's out of retirement, you know.

Roger: So, speaking of nice guys, the next topic we have, there's a lawsuit against Deutsche Telekom.

Don: Yeah.

Roger: And this is some real palace intrigue here.

Don: Oh, it's it's like get your popcorn out. It's priceless, right?

Don: Was Sprint.

Roger: Yeah, yeah. So the backdrop on this — I didn't know that, right? The backdrop on this is all the inside baseball that was happening during and after the Sprint acquisition. And some of the allegations are pretty hefty, like insider trading. You can read how the politics, how the Game of Thrones gets done. And you read the internal emails. Like, oh, we have to pressure this person and she has to feel your wrath. If you have a subscription to Handelsblatt, you can read it in German. Or you can copy and paste it and put it in an AI and it will translate it into English. Or you can get the transcripts. Fascinating, fascinating things. It beats the living daylights out of anything else I have read this year. It's like letter writing to Marcelo Claure that he's a money launderer, but that he still likes him. Things like that. If you ever thought that John Legere was unfiltered, read that. And you see how the advisors are talking to the senior executives and all of that stuff. So, we leave all of this for other people to report about. But I'm like, it's worth the time to read it. If you're a journalist, it's worth the time to read it. It's pretty wild.

Don: Oh yes, it is wild. It is wild. So keeping on the T-Mobile track here, we had another fee increase that happened recently.

Roger: Right, regulatory fees are going up on a per line basis by anywhere between 50 cents and a dollar depending on the type. But because it's a below the line charge, it does not trigger the price lock.

Don: Price lock.

Roger: Yeah.

Don: But sadly, as a customer, you still have to pay it, right?

Roger: Yeah. And it will filter into the wireless CPI. The CPI thing is going to happen. And so, the bigger backdrop is the wireless industry has been really good with affordability. The wallet share has gone down, all of these things. There were price increases a while back. And then I had a lot of inquiries from financial analysts who all looked at the CPI and were like, oh my God, this went up by 5.9% in that one month. And it's just the one month blip. And what's going on? I said, well, these were the fee increases and the re-rating plan migrations.

Don: Yeah, all that stuff.

Roger: On the back end of the book by AT&T and T-Mobile. Verizon was the main suspect in the past, or the main perpetrator in the past. They have not done this anymore. And Dan Schulman has said he's going to get more money from more customers, and not more money from the same customers or fewer customers. And I think that's the right strategy. So they're going to play both sides of the book. I hope it's not going to put the spotlight on affordability that we're already seeing from this White House, and depending on how the midterms go. From one or two houses of Congress, when the Democrats win, or if they win, or how that plays out. But both sides are looking at affordability. Telecom, to its credit, has been a lot more measured in its price increases. Costs go up, right? And so you have to hand it through. Telecom has been very responsible.

Don: My phone bill's a lot more predictable than my gas bill, put that way, right?

Roger: Absolutely, right?

Don: Or your egg bill and whatever else is out there, right? I go to the grocery store and I'm like, I didn't buy anything and this was $80. I'm like, nuts. I went to Costco, bought water and two, three more things, and I was like $60. I was like, Jesus.

Roger: You know, on the other hand, things are getting more expensive, but be careful what you wish for. If you're getting ahead of yourself, there might be a congressional oversight or wrath of White House coming.

Don: To be honest, prepaid is a stalking horse too, right? I mean, you can—

Roger: Yeah, you can save a lot of money by moving to prepaid if you really want to.

Don: Oh, absolutely.

Roger: So there are plenty of alternatives. And then last but not least, I was in New York at the beginning of the week. Panasonic invited me to the Toughbook launch. And it's the 30th anniversary. So, the Toughbook is this really, really rugged laptop that you can drop and it doesn't break, you can submerge it in water and it keeps working.

Don: Right, it's for engineers, police officers, it fits into that first responder thing.

Don: All right. Well, we'll continue to cover all these topics, particularly I think the Deutsche Telekom thing — I don't think we've heard the last on that.

Roger: No, and get out your popcorn, folks, it's going to be good. Yeah, and we're going to get a subscription — you have to pay for getting the transcripts, so we were downloading the transcripts as they come.

Don: This is where you learn all the real things. All right, we'll talk to you next week.

Roger: Talk to you next week. Thank you.