Thoughts on Tech News of Note - 04-17-2026

• Amazon Buys Globalstar
• Netgear's Conditional FCC Approval
• RAM-Driven Consumer Tech Price Increases

Amazon Buys Globalstar
This week, Amazon announced their agreement to buy Globalstar, a satellite communications company. Amazon will pay $11.57B, or about $90 a share in a mix of cash and stock. The deal will require US and international regulatory body approval and is expected to close some time in 2027. Amazon intends to use Globalstar's infrastructure to launch their direct-to-device (D2D) service that will enable voice and data service for smartphones. This offering will be part of their larger satellite communications services branded Amazon Leo. Amazon Leo will be a competitor to Elon Musk's Starlink.

Globalstar currently powers the emergency SOS feature that Apple offers for iPhones starting with the iPhone14 and newer. Amazon has indicated that it will continue to provide this service. Apple will eventually sign on to the new Amazon Leo service when it launches some time in 2028 if all regulatory approvals are granted. Apple invested in Globalstar in 2024 and has a 20% stake in the company, so they stand to benefit financially from this deal on that end as well.

Amazon previously obtained approval from the Federal Communication Commission (FCC) to deploy more than 3200 satellites to support its Amazon Leo service. As a part of that agreement, Amazon must hit their FCC deployment milestones. Amazon must deploy 50% of its authorized fleet of satellites by July 2026. Amazon currently has 240 satellites in orbit and while acquiring Globalstar will not add to that number, it will add the ground infrastructure to support them. Amazon will need to launch another 1400+ satellites by the July 2026 milestone to avoid losing its orbital spectrum. The full fleet of satellites must be in place by July 30, 2029. Amazon is not currently on track to meet its 2026 deadline and has already filed for a 24-month extension. Amazon has scheduled more than 100 launches to help it meet its goals, but owning Globalstar will enable them to have a viable satellite service now without needing to wait for the full deployment of new satellites to be completed.

Globalstar's services are currently limited to satellite mobile messaging and asset tracking for industrial assets such as ships and oil rigs. They also license their spectrum to other communications companies like Nokia and Qualcomm to create private networks for locations where Wi-Fi and cell phone service may not exist or provides insufficient coverage. As the new satellites are deployed, capabilities planned for the Amazon Leo brand will broaden the range of services Amazon will be able to provide in the future. There will be tiers of service with cheaper and slower connectivity tiers intended for mobile use hovering around speeds of 100 Mbps and enterprise offerings topping out at 1 Gbps speeds. These speeds will be possible because Amazon Leo satellites will use inter-satellite lasers to transmit data rather than needing to send data back to the ground. Amazon will also use satellite communication to enhance its cloud service Amazon Web Services (AWS) so that data can be processed on satellites or at nearby ground stations for near-instantaneous responses.

Assuming this deal goes through, it will be good to see some competition for Starlink as well as the potential expansion of satellite communications services available for consumers and corporations. Attention now is on the regulatory bodies in the US and abroad that will need to approve the deal and for Amazon's future track record in getting satellites deployed so it can meet its deadlines.

The space race between Blue Origin (Jeff Bezos) and SpaceX (Elon Musk) has hit the next level.

Netgear's Conditional FCC Approval
Based on the way data is collected, it does not seem possible to determine Netgear's market share in the US, but its global share of the consumer networking market is about 40%. The United States is Netgear's largest market and based on the available data, they perform better in the high-end market with their Orbi mesh systems and newer Wi-Fi 7 products. Netgear has also been working to increase their enterprise market share, especially among small to mid-size companies where they often compete directly with Cisco and Ubiquiti.

It is impossible at this time to know if any of that has anything to do with the conditional approval the FCC granted to Netgear to sell new foreign-made consumer networking products through at least October 1, 2027. In March, the FCC banned all consumer grade routers not made in the US, which effectively banned products from nearly all companies currently selling products in the US. As Netgear is the only company that has received an exemption to date, it now has a monopoly of sorts on new consumer networking products coming into the US. Netgear is apparently already capitalizing on this opportunity by marketing its Nighthawk and Orbi routers as being systems that are not impacted by the ban and will continue to receive security updates. All other companies are allowed to provide security updates for existing products until March 1, 2027. The FCC has not outlined what will happen past that date but has indicated it will review this decision in the future.

When the FCC originally announced the router ban, it indicated that foreign-made routers posed a national security risk and companies would need to pledge to move production to the US to receive approval. Yet as far as anyone can tell, Netgear has made no such commitments. It also does not appear that it conducted or passed any security audits to verify the safety and security of its products. We are told that the US Department of Defense determined that Netgear's products do not pose an "unacceptable" risk to national security, but we are not told how they arrived at this conclusion. Some have speculated that because Netgear is headquartered in the US and most of its production does not happen in China that this may have helped its case.

It seems possible that other companies with headquarters or significant presence in the US such as Eero (Amazon), Google, and Ubiquiti may also receive conditional approvals in the future, but it is certainly not guaranteed. For now, if you need to buy a new router and you want the newest technology, you may want to look closely at Netgear products first.

RAM-Driven Consumer Tech Price Increases
As random-access memory (RAM) vendors continue to prioritize high-bandwidth (HBM) memory for data centers and graphics processing unit (GPU) manufacturers, the prices for consumer electronics have been increasing accordingly. Several companies have already announced price increases for existing products. NVIDIA raised prices for their newest GPUs by up to 55% and mid-range GPUs have increased by as much as 36%. Likewise, as component prices go up, so also do computer prices. Gaming and high-performance laptops are seeing price increases by as much as 30%. This week, Microsoft announced price increases for the Surface Pro 11 and Surface Laptop 7. Some models are now priced as much as $500 more than before. Microsoft attributed the higher cost of RAM and other components as the driving factor behind this change. Market prices for gaming consoles and smartphones are increasing as well. Samsung raised prices on some phones and tablets by nearly $300 for some models and finding new budget phones below $200 is becoming increasingly more difficult. Even storage prices are rising. You may have bought your last 512GB microSD card for $50 but you'll find that even the off-brand microSD cards now start at $100 and go way up from there. Pricing for solid-state hard drives is also up dramatically, with some prices double where they were last year. Because most consumer electronics require some amount of RAM and storage, as these prices continue to go up, the cost of our devices will go up as well. It is uncertain at this point how much higher prices will go, but there seems to be consensus that prices will remain elevated well into 2027.

I bought my last computer at the end of 2025 with the vague threat of higher prices on the horizon. I bought an ASUS ROG Flow Z13 2025 with 64GB of RAM when it went on sale for about $2200 before tax. The same configuration is now selling for about $2700. I do wish now I had bought the 128GB version, but what I have will serve me for quite some time. If you think you may need a new computer or some other electronic gizmo before the end of 2027, you may want to consider accelerating your purchase. But if you don't need anything right now, it is probably best to sit it out for a while and see if prices stabilize sometime next year or early in 2028. It's rare that prices go back down after they've gone up, but because RAM pricing has been so clearly targeted as the source of price increases, if RAM prices go down there may be some pressure on manufacturers to reduce prices. More likely, it may be that if the RAM situation improves, prices may stay where they are, but manufacturers may have some room to add new features and capabilities to products without raising prices. We will have to see how far the corporate greed will go and what other market pressures impact pricing over the next 18 months or so.