- Dish Wireless wants to move quickly through Chapter 11, but tower companies and other creditors are pushing back hard
- A key dispute is whether the Dish Wireless and Dish DBS bankruptcies should proceed together or separately
- EchoStar is the stalking horse bidder for Dish Wireless’ network assets – with a $300 million cash bid
If you’ve been following Dish Wireless for any length of time, you probably had an inkling that things would get messier before they got better. This week’s bankruptcy court hearing proved that out.
To put it simply, it’s super complicated and a lot of issues are being disputed. Dish & Co. wants to push things through as fast as possible while tower companies and other creditors are asking for more time to address multiple issues, including intercompany loans and the whole “force majeure” argument.
U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Christopher Lopez heard from attorneys representing Dish Wireless and Dish DBS, as well as tower companies and other creditors during a hearing in the Southern District of Texas on Wednesday.
One thing that has very much not been decided is whether the Dish Wireless and Dish DBS cases proceed separately or as one, according to Anton Gorbounov, a telecom analyst at Octus. Dish Wireless and Dish DBS packaged them as proceeding together but tower company creditors say they should be separated. They’re fine with the DBS plan proceeding but say the Dish Wireless case needs far more time to sort out.
Under U.S. Bankruptcy Code, the debtors have exclusivity to propose a plan and Judge Lopez was explicit during the hearing that he’s not the one to make the decision.
“I take no position on that one way or the other. I think the debtors have exclusivity to propose their plan, that's what the bankruptcy code gives,” Lopez said during the hearing. “My job is to consider the plan that the debtors have proposed.”
Crown Castle flags intercompany loans
In a court filing, Crown Castle laid out its objections, alleging Dish DBS and Dish Wireless want to shove the bankruptcy through on an aggressive timeline to limit investigation into numerous intercompany transactions that “the debtors have secretly undertaken over the last year to orchestrate the present cases.”
For example, in August 2025, EchoStar transferred the Boost Mobile business – worth billions of dollars – out of the Dish Wireless organization to “purportedly satisfy, in part, an alleged unsecured intercompany claim that Dish Wireless owed to Dish Network Corporation,” Crown Castle asserted.
Crown Castle went on to argue that the Dish Wireless debtors’ cases aren’t typical pre-packaged bankruptcies and there’s no basis to treat them as such. “Dish Wireless does not appear to have any ongoing operations; rather, it appears to hold legacy liabilities and assets resulting from EchoStar’s decision to sell its spectrum for $42 billion – a $12 billion profit – and abandon its efforts to build out a nationwide 5G network,” Crown Castle told the court.
EchoStar as stalking horse bidder
As for the Dish Wireless network – the actual radios and antennas on structures throughout the country – Dish has proposed EchoStar as a stalking horse bidder for those assets. The stalking horse bid is $300 million in cash. The company will need to tell the court if it receives any qualifying bids.
“To be very clear, the bid is for the assets of the Dish Wireless debtors, which at this point include some cash, some equipment (on towers and in the warehouse) ... The operating assets of Boost Wireless are owned by a different EchoStar subsidiary that is NOT part of this bankruptcy,” Gorbounov told Fierce
Indeed, EchoStar has said that the Boost Mobile and Gen Mobile cell phone brands are operating “business as usual” while the bankruptcy proceedings are going on. All remaining customers were moved off the Dish network and onto AT&T’s RAN network last year.
When will we know who gets paid and how much?
Once the AT&T spectrum sale closes, Dish Network Corporation will contribute a portion of the proceeds to DBS to unwind the remaining prepetition intercompany loans and to pay a $2 billion bond that was supposed to mature on July 1 in cash, at par. The rest of the bonds will remain outstanding while other DBS creditors are unaffected, Gorbounov said.
Smaller Dish Wireless claimants (with claims under $100,000) can recover from the FCC trust fund that EchoStar is required to set up as part of its spectrum sales to AT&T and SpaceX. The trust has $200 million of its $2.4 billion total earmarked for such claims, he noted.
On the Dish Wireless side of the house, “the rest will take a while,” he said. “The substantive issues … will likely take some time to litigate and may in fact not be decided until after confirmation.”
The next hearing is scheduled for July 23, when the court is expected to hear the conditional disclosure statement approval, plan solicitation procedures and the previously filed debtor-in-possession (DIP) motion.
Fierce Network’s related coverage on Dish
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EchoStar CEO Akhavan resigns amid Dish bankruptcy
Crown Castle accuses Dish of $3.5B payment default
Opinion: Dish Wireless bankruptcy is a regulatory failure years in the making
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Dish files for Chapter 11 bankruptcy
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