- Boost Mobile CTO Eben Albertyn is spreading the word about the quality of Boost’s network
- But he finds it perplexing that SpaceX/Starlink aren’t held to the same standard as wireless carriers when it comes to paying for spectrum
- Now is the time to support American companies, and Boost network is "the most American network ever built in the U.S.," he said
Now is a good time to talk about the quality of the Boost Mobile network, whose very future is threatened by the FCC’s investigation into parent company EchoStar.
Things got more complicated on Friday when EchoStar filed an 8K SEC filing revealing that it skipped an interest payment of about $326 million due May 30 because of uncertainty over its spectrum rights and inability to make decisions regarding its Boost business. The company is hoping a 30-day grace period will give it time to resolve issues with the FCC.
While EchoStar’s leadership deals with all of that, its network needs to keep humming along and that’s where Boost Mobile CTO Eben Albertyn comes in. He declined to talk about the May 30 8K filing in an interview Friday, but he was happy to point to a recent Opensignal report that rated Boost No. 1 in 5G reliability and 5G coverage in 15 major U.S. cities.
“We continue to demonstrate on an ongoing basis that the Boost network not only gives the best value to any retail customer in the U.S., but you're also getting the best network,” he told Fierce. “I think that is extremely exciting news for customers.”
But as we’ve said before, isn’t it easy to be “best” when you don’t have very many users vying for capacity at any given time? Actually, he said, an empty network “only helps you a little bit.” There are still oodles of performance metrics that go into network evaluation: latency, handovers, the length of a data connection and so on. “All of those things are tremendously challenging technical obstacles that have to be overcome for you to have the most reliable network,” he said.
Boost’s network now covers more than 80% of the U.S. population and because it’s standalone (SA) 5G, it’s capable of doing network slicing. The CTO wasn’t prepared to name the handful of government agencies that have successfully conducted network slicing trials with Boost, but because it’s cloud native, “we did it on very short timelines,” he said. “We get things done very quickly.”
Boost CTO: We’re using AWS-3 and AWS-4
As for what spectrum bands Boost is using, he said Boost’s terrestrial network is using the 600, 700, 1800 and 2100 MHz spectrum bands, which includes AWS-3 and AWS-4, aka n66 and n70.
That’s relevant because SpaceX contends that EchoStar barely uses the AWS-4 band, which SpaceX argues should be shared with satellite companies, namely itself.
Indeed, SpaceX is attempting a land grab at spectrum in various places, not just EchoStar’s. It’s also lobbying for access to the upper C-band and spectrum currently licensed to Globalstar. Yet, as EchoStar points out, SpaceX already possesses licenses for 25,500 MHz of spectrum that it got “without paying a single penny to the U.S. Treasury.”
EchoStar paid more than $40 billion for its spectrum and AT&T, T-Mobile, Verizon and UScellular each have contributed hundreds of billions of dollars to the U.S. Treasury through their purchase of spectrum licenses over the years. Therefore, “I'm perplexed as to why star Starlink, SpaceX are not held to the same standard,” Albertyn said.
Of course, one explanation is SpaceX CEO Elon Musk’s relationship with President Trump and by extension, Trump champion FCC Chairman Brendan Carr. Albertyn didn’t go there, but he said Boost’s open RAN network is made up almost exclusively of American vendors, which follows the ambitions of the first Trump administration to use homegrown gear and eliminate Chinese vendors from U.S. telecom networks.
“We know that China is currently winning the race on 5G and potentially on 6G, and the way to combat that is to bring innovation back to the U.S.,” Albertyn said. “Bringing innovation back to the U.S. needs U.S. entities, vendors and partners to flourish. Boost is the most American network ever built in the history of the United States.”
And please don’t move CBRS
One thing that would help Boost is if the FCC were to raise the power limits and change the out-of-band emissions for the Citizens Broadband Radio Services (CBRS) band at 3.5 GHz.
Currently, mobile services on that spectrum are “completely out of the question,” but by doing those two very simple things, it would make CBRS much more valuable to carriers like Boost.
Modifications to the CBRS band are currently being studied at the FCC, but until those are addressed, Boost isn’t using the CBRS band.
Moving the CBRS band to the lower 3 GHz portion of the band, as AT&T has proposed, is not a good idea, in his opinion. “I think that would be tremendously challenging and it would probably take far more than a decade,” he said. “What we’re proposing could be done by Thanksgiving.”