- The death of Dish as a fourth facilities-based wireless carrier was the turkey of the year
- Cloud outages are an ongoing problem
- Verizon's job cuts brought an unpleasant surprise for many in time for the holidays
Let's go down to the farm to pick out our Fierce turkeys of the year. There are plenty of choices this year – from Dish to outages to Verizon and more.
The death of Dish as No. 4
The death of Dish is the most obvious turkey of the last 12 months. Dish went from being promoted as potentially America’s fourth mobile network operator (MNO) along with AT&T, T-Mobile and Verizon to a smoking husk of a network also-ran. Dish’s owner EchoStar went from telling the FCC it would use the 5G spectrum allocated for Dish to selling off huge swathes of its own spectrum holdings to AT&T and SpaceX.
“That is the biggest and fattest turkey of the year,” agreed Daryl Schoolar, analyst at Recon Analytics, of the Dish debacle.
Major cloud outages
There have been multiple major cloud outages this year, from Amazon Web Services to Google Cloud and Cloudflare. When the cloud goes down, large parts of the internet do too.
“Cloudflare, AWS and Google Cloud have all had outages this year that have taken down different mobile applications and websites,” Schoolar noted.
These cloud outages are clearly going to continue into the foreseeable future.
Verizon’s shocking cuts
The 13,000-plus job cuts at Verizon last week was the culmination of the chopping of former CEO Hans Vestberg and his replacement with new CEO Dan Schulman in early October.
“Verizon's lack of performance,” leading to the changes at the top and the lay-offs, was one of AvidThink principal Roy Chua’s top turkey picks.
Many of these cuts will come at Verizon stores, with around 200 of them being changed over to franchise stores rather than corporately held. Other job cuts will come in the network, 5G Acceleration and other teams.
Nokia’s private network wobbles
Although Nokia is not really getting out of the private network game – which sent the turkeys a trotting – its talk about private networking worried many.
“The biggest turkey would have to be Nokia's messaging fiasco last week, especially after having added over 40 new private network projects last quarter as tracked in our database,” SNS Telecom & IT’s director James Bennett told Fierce. “Close to 60% of Nokia's new private network projects in Q3 2025 have a 5G element compared to just 25% in Q3 2024 a year ago.”
iPhone Air doesn’t light up the skies with sales
Apple has already pulled back on production on its thinnest – yet still $999 – phone so far. The iPhone Air was introduced in September, but the Financial Times reports that the vendor is already pulling back production even as other iPhone 17 models are selling.
“It doesn’t appear to be selling well,” Schoolar concluded.