Weekly output: FCC independence, Starlink mobile-broadband ambitions, TAE + TMTG, best WiFi hotspots

In addition to wrapping up my holiday shopping far later than I expected, this week saw me mostly finish migrating from Evernote to Obsidian after management at the note-taking app I’ve used since 2010 elected to impose a 92 percent rate increase.

12/18/2025: FCC Scrambles to Edit Website After Chair Refuses to Say Agency Is Independent, PCMag

Here we have yet another case of the 2025 version of FCC chair Brendan Carr taking a position on a tech-policy issue explicitly rejected by an earlier model year of this man. But this time around, the Trump-loyalist chairman made his heel turn even more obvious by apparently ordering up a hasty edit of the commission’s about-us page.

12/19/2025: SpaceX Exec Tips ‘Real’ High-Speed Cellular Starlink, With 15K More Satellites, PCMag

This story started with my attending a space-telecom conference in D.C. two Mondays ago, then I needed to educate myself much more about SpaceX’s ambitions for direct-to-device broadband from a future generation of Starlink satellites.

12/19/2025: Trump’s Truth Social to Merge With Fusion Startup You’ve Probably Never Heard Of, PCMag

Will the Trump family still be so enthusiastic about TAE Technologies if their backing somehow helps it finally commercialize fusion power generation and in so doing hammers the last nail into the coffin of the coal-fired power plants so beloved by our scientifically-illiterate president? (Answer: That question is probably irrelevant, because coal is already so uncompetitive that this administration’s fossil-fuel fetishists feel compelled to issue orders to keep obsolete coal plants online on a fake “emergency” basis.)

12/19/2025: The Best Wi-Fi Hotspot, Wirecutter

I updated the “What to look forward to” section of this guide–last updated almost a year ago–to note how AT&T has added two newer models to its lineup. One of them looks like an immense improvement over our previous pick from that carrier.

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