Dish Teases Multiple 5G Cities Coming By Year End

Dish Network hinted that its yet-to-be-released 5G service will be live in multiple U.S. cities before the end of year. The aspirational greenfield operator earlier this month said Las Vegas will be the first U.S. city to gain access to its 5G open radio access network (RAN) before October.

“We’re on path to launching that in the third quarter, but it’s one of a number of markets we have coming along. We just haven’t announced those markets through the end of the year, but it’s the first obviously of a number that we have in flight today,” Stephen Bye, EVP and chief commercial officer at Dish, said during the company’s Q1 2021 earnings call.

“We’ve got activity going on across the country to actually build out this network,” he said.

Operator Envisions ‘Network of Networks’

Moreover, because Dish is assembling “a network of networks,” as Marc Rouanne, EVP and chief network officer, described it, the operator will have the ability early on to create a “sub network” with the aid of network slicing, automation, and SDN.

Those capabilities will arrive in a later, but not final, phase of Dish’s network buildout, Bye explained. “While we build out a nationwide network, we are in the process of working with customers and prospective customers on private networks that are not limited by the geography of our national footprint, so we can deploy those within their environments to support their business operations,” he said.

Analysts peppered Dish’s executive team with questions about its recent deal with Amazon Web Services (AWS) to serve as its preferred cloud provider and base for Dish’s 5G network.

“I think we’re going to be their largest customer in cloud and I think they may be the largest customer in our network,” Charlie Ergen, co-founder and chairman of Dish Network, said on the earnings call.

“It’s a dramatic paradigm shift in the way a network is built, and it’s an advantage over legacy carriers that have 30-year-old architecture,” he said. Existing operators will “slowly get things in the cloud, they’ll put pieces of their network in the cloud, but they just can’t take a frontloader and move everything to the cloud at one time.”

Can Dish Really Build Nationwide 5G for $10B?

Ergen also held firm to Dish’s years-long insistence that the company can build a nationwide 5G network with $10 billion. “We anticipated a cloud-native network from the beginning so the $10 billion total buildout cost that we announced a couple years ago, I think some people are still skeptical, but you can see where we’re headed,” he said, adding that Dish’s agreement with AWS has a material impact on capex.

“Open RAN was pie in the sky a couple years ago. We’ll prove that it works in Las Vegas. Cloud-native architecture maybe was pie in the sky a couple years ago. We’re going to prove that it works, and the rest of the world will follow. You’re seeing that now. You’re seeing open RAN now being adopted around the world,” Ergen said.

Dish’s engineers are also increasingly impressed with the architecture, particularly with respect to how quickly it allows the operator to scale up and scale down services or new software, Rouanne said.

In a traditional wireless network, “everything is frozen and you plan your investment 18 years ahead,” he said. “We scale up and down during the day, during the night. We need a platform to test a new private use case, we just scale it. It’s quite fascinating for engineers to see what we can do now.”

That’s something that sets cloud-native, open RAN infrastructure apart from traditional networks, Rouanne said, adding that many operators are slowed down because they are over-optimized. “They never have more capacity than they need. We have unlimited capacity,” he claimed.

“For us it’s a luxury because then we can put additional software, we can do automation, we can put things that no telco would dream of, because all their hardware is tight. They’re running at 70 to 80%,” Rouanne said.