- Dish’s wireless dream crashes and burns as Boost’s network heads for shutdown
- Was it inevitable? Not necessarily, but a series of misfortunes and missteps paved the way for failure
- Now all eyes are on EchoStar’s ambitions for a D2D network. Too little too late?
Enjoying a week off before the Labor Day holiday is awesome but brings its own issues. Missing the Big News of the wireless industry was one of them: EchoStar’s $23 billion sale of 600 MHz and 3.45 GHz spectrum to AT&T.
Don’t worry. I’ve no complaints here. My editorial colleagues at Fierce Network did the heavy lifting. They crushed it, covering everything from reports hot off the press and the ramifications for cable and MVNOs to the impact on consumers and future spectrum sales.
So I’ll keep this short and sweet. The sale good news for AT&T. But it’s bad news for EchoStar, as well as its Dish Network and Boost Mobile wireless ambitions, even though investors were champing at the bit for EchoStar to sell its spectrum. Let’s face it. Practically from the get-go, or so it seems, Wall Street was gunning for EchoStar Chairman Charlie Ergen to sell his spectrum. Did you see EchoStar’s 70% jump in stock last week? Whew.
A take in one word
My “hot take” at the time of hearing last week’s news is pretty much the same as it is today. It can be summed up in one word: Dang. It’s a sad day when we can no longer root for four facilities-based wireless operators in the U.S. Four is much more exciting than three, and I’d argue, more competitive, despite what the chairman of the FCC says.
Not that Boost/EchoStar/Dish ever had much of a fighting chance. Things got off to a rocky start for Dish pretty much immediately when T-Mobile cut off Boost’s CDMA network sooner than Ergen and Company expected. That set off a series of missteps, mostly in the retail and marketing sides of the house as opposed to the network.
There were technical hurdles, to be sure, such as getting OEMs like Apple to make devices that worked on Dish’s own greenfield open RAN network in addition to the T-Mobile and AT&T networks that most of its devices were using under MVNO arrangements. Using its own network brought owner’s economics, but only a tiny fraction of Boost’s 7 million or so customers ever used its own greenfield 5G network.
Now the network, sans the core, will be decommissioned along with Ergen’s high hopes for using open RAN to distinguish his company from the entrenched incumbents. Anyone else thinking about WiMAX right about now? That technology was supposed to help Clearwire establish itself as a fifth wireless carrier, but it barely made it past the starting line.
Much ado about 3.45 GHz
As for EchoStar’s spectrum, that’s been at the heart of Ergen’s game all along. EchoStar is selling about 30 MHz of 3.45 GHz spectrum to AT&T, which seems justified. An EchoStar spokesperson today confirmed that Boost Mobile is not using its 3.45 GHz spectrum.
That lines up with what Boost Mobile CTO Eben Albertyn told me a few months ago: that Boost’s terrestrial network was mainly using the 600 MHz band, as well as 700, 1800 and 2100 MHz spectrum bands, which includes AWS-3 and AWS-4, aka n66 and n70.
Even though it bought licenses, Boost didn’t use the Citizens Broadband Radio Services (CBRS) 3.5 GHz band because it was waiting for the FCC to pass reforms that would give the CBRS band higher power levels, making it far more useful to Boost. That waiting game also applied CBRS’s next-door neighbor, the 3.45 GHz band, where power levels are much higher than CBRS, but it didn’t behoove Boost to build out the 3.45 GHz band until it knew what was happening with CBRS power levels.
“It would make sense for me to have clarity on high-power CBRS before you start to hang thousands and thousands of radios that are designed for a different technology disposition,” Albertyn told me at the time.
That also applies to the C-band, which at around 3.7 GHz on the spectrum range, is on the other side of 3.5 GHz. “Before we start rolling out C-band and CBRS, I think it would be wise to have this conversation with the FCC at this point in time,” he said. (BTW, that conversation about CBRS power levels is still ongoing at the FCC.)
It makes sense for AT&T to acquire the 3.45 GHz spectrum because it’s the only one of the Big 3 U.S. wireless carriers that’s using 3.45 GHz. The 600 MHz band is less obvious since AT&T banked on the 700 MHz band for its low-band 5G spectrum and thus far hasn’t built out the 600 MHz band.
That’s led to some speculation that AT&T could swap the 600 MHz spectrum for T-Mobile’s C-band spectrum, which sounds logical, but business deals aren’t always done in ways that make the most sense spectrum-wise.
All eyes on 2 GHz spectrum
The big question in all of this is who gets the 2 GHz spectrum that EchoStar has talked about using for its direct-to-device (D2D) satellite service. It’s the same spectrum that SpaceX has its sights on, arguing that Ergen’s company barely uses it and therefore it should be made available for other satellite companies, namely SpaceX – preferably, for free.
Analysts at LightShed Partners last week noted that the 2 GHz/AWS-4 spectrum is EchoStar’s single largest asset, with a potential market value north of $25 billion. SpaceX could use this spectrum to supercharge its D2D ambitions, potentially enabling streaming-grade satellite-to-phone services. But will SpaceX pay for the spectrum? Doubtful.
For its part, EchoStar makes a good game out of playing up its unique strengths in the D2D space, including its Hughes Network satellite assets. Last I heard, they plan to build a new $5 billion LEO constellation over the next several years. According to EchoStar CEO Hamid Akhavan, more details will be shared during World Space Business Week in Paris September 15-19.
My take? EchoStar’s going to be too late for the D2D game, too. Others disagree, saying the EchoStar/AT&T deal makes it more likely the first stage of EchoStar’s constellation is going to get built. But like so many of these stories, the upshot often goes something like this: Don’t underestimate Ergen.
I hate to say it, but it looks like the time has come to retire that old trope.
Op-eds from industry experts, analysts or our editorial staff are opinion pieces that do not represent the opinions of Fierce Network.