Greenfield 5G provider Dish has met its second Federal Communications Commission (FCC) deployment deadline, covering over 70% of the U.S. population with a 5G signal, the operator announced this morning.
“We have made significant progress on our network buildout and can now focus on monetizing the network through retail and enterprise growth,” John Swieringa, president and chief operating officer of Dish Wireless, said in a statement.
Analysts had expected Dish to meet the milestone. New Street Research said in a note that the move to start to offer 5G voice was more of a surprise.
"They also announced that 5G voice service (called VoNR) is now working in markets covering 20% of the US population; this is a positive step for Dish’s network economics, as Dish customers have to date typically had to rely on the MVNOs for all usage in markets lacking VoNR, because of the difficulty of hand offs between Dish’s 5G standalone network and the other carrier networks," the analysts wrote.
Network vendor Samsung also said that it "has delivered and deployed [Open-RAN] compliant 5G radios and [virtualized] RAN software for Dish Wireless, and integrated them with Dish-selected private and public cloud platforms. Samsung also worked with Dish Wireless' O-RAN partners to deploy its O-RAN compliant RAN and vRAN solutions across the network, in a company blog
Dave Mayo, executive vice president of network development at Dish had previously told Silverlinings that the speed of Dish’s deployment was down to AWS hosting its 5G core.
“We’ve put the whole core network in the cloud, utilizing AWS, which is different than anybody has done – frankly – at this scale on the planet,” Mayo said earlier this year.
Putting the pure 5G standalone (5G SA) core in the cloud significantly cut the cost of building out the nascent 5G network for Dish, since it didn’t need brick-and-mortar facilities to run the core in.
Still, paying to roll out a 5G radio access network (RAN) across a country as large as the United States is a costly business anyway you cut it. Dish estimated it would spend $10 billion on deploying the new network in 2020. Analysts felt that was a low estimate.
Dish is certainly feeling the cost in its pocketbook right now. The 5G and satellite TV provider’s net income halved in the first quarter of 2023. The company reported income of $233 million for the first quarter of 2023, compared to $433 million for the same quarter a year ago.
Beyond a limited network, device scarcity is one reason that users haven’t been flocking to the new 5G contender. Dish currently offers the Motorola edge+ 2022 and 2023 smartphones, Samsung A23, and the Dish-made, Boost-exclusive Celero 5G+ to 5G subscribers now.
Analysys Mason previously noted that the Samsung Galaxy S22 is “somewhat compatible” with the new network. “The lack of compatible devices means that the adoption of Dish’s network is effectively on hold, or at least constrained,” the analysts said.
Dish executives are acutely aware of this situation and said on the Q1 conference call that the operator plans to carry the iPhone in the back half of this year.
Once it has started to address the glaring lack of devices available for the network, Dish chairman Charlie Ergen noted that building out 5G private networks for enterprises on the fledgling network would be a “2024 event” for Dish.
Network development boss Mayo had previously said much the same about network slicing for the operator.
So hurry up and wait for next year!
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