Hindsight is 20/20. But you didn’t need a crystal ball in 2019 to know that the U.S. government’s decision to tap Dish Network (eventually, Dish Wireless) to become the country’s fourth wireless carrier wouldn’t pan out well. And the regulators who waved it on – both at the time and as cracks in the plan became more evident – need to be held accountable.
I’d argue that we never should have even gotten to this point. Not even close. Dish shouldn’t have been positioned as a prospective fourth Tier 1 provider in the first place.
If at first you don’t succeed, try… for a new deadline
The whole point of handing Dish the Boost Mobile business as part of the T-Mobile and Sprint merger was to jumpstart its mandated effort to become the nation’s fourth Tier 1 wireless carrier. To achieve its purpose, Dish also had to build out its own network. But by the time the deal was sealed, Dish already had a track record of not meeting buildout targets for its wireless licenses.
This history is important as it was a preview of what was to come. In March 2017, Dish informed the FCC that it had failed to meet interim buildout deadlines for its AWS-4 licenses, a failure which triggered an acceleration of its final deadline. Dish was given until March 2020 to provide signal coverage and offer service to 70% of the population in the areas covered by its AWS-4 licenses.
At the same time, Dish failed to meet interim deadlines for its 700 MHz Lower E Block licenses. As with the AWS-4 licenses, its final build requirement was pulled forward by a year to March 2020.
Another “whoopsie daisy” came in May 2018, when Dish failed to meet buildout deadlines for its H block licenses. It was given until April 2022 to cover 75% of the population in those license areas.
If you remember ever hearing about Dish hoarding spectrum licenses, this is why. It acquired its 700 MHz licenses in 2008, its AWS-4 licenses in 2012 and H block licenses in 2014. It had the spectrum long before the T-Mobile-Sprint deal and did almost nothing with it. In 2018, Dish claimed to be building an IoT network using its spectrum, but the plan was short-lived and at the time people questioned how sound – and real – the project was.
Little surprise, then, that the pattern continued.
Bad habits
Dish made a big show of having a buildout deadline countdown clock in its headquarters. But in 2019, with the T-Mobile-Sprint deal now in play, Dish turned around and asked for more time to meet its buildouts for all three license groups. The FCC in 2020 agreed to extend its interim deadline for those three license blocks to June 2023 but required it to deploy 5G service to 70% of the population in areas covered by its licenses. If it failed to hit that target but covered at least 50% of the population with service by its deadline, the FCC said it would automatically extend the deadline to June 2025.
But at Dish’s request in September 2024, the goalposts moved again – this time to December 2026. At the time, consumer advocates backed the move as one designed to give Dish the best chance to become a true fourth competitor. But the request was a flashing red warning sign.
Dish Wireless didn’t make it to December 2026. It effectively gave up in mid-2025 when it decided to sell its spectrum to AT&T (600 MHz and 3.45 GHz) and SpaceX (AWS-4 and H Block). It finally filed for bankruptcy last month.
But just to fully appreciate what happened: Dish sat on its 700 MHz licenses (which it still owns) for nearly 20 years and its AWS-4 and H Block holdings for over a decade. After all that time, there's precious little to show for it. For comparison, the real Tier 1 operators who won C-band spectrum in 2021 started deploying it a year later.
Did Dish make some effort to build its own network after acquiring Boost? Yes. It does deserve some credit for launching commercial 5G service in 2022 and meeting at least some of its targets in 2023, which called for it to deploy at least 15,000 5G cell sites and at least 30 MHz of its 5G spectrum. And it’s worth acknowledging that what Dish was doing – building a greenfield 5G network – was hard. According to its bankruptcy filing, it ended up having deployed more than 144,000 radios across over 24,000 tower sites before calling it quits.
But there were always questions about Dish’s financial footing, as its build estimates came in comically low and its debt steadily climbed. And despite bringing on strong veteran telecom talent from the likes of Nokia, T-Mobile, Sprint and Vodafone, the company somehow still always felt woefully unprepared and unequipped for the task at hand.
Perhaps Dish would have known more about what it was getting into and been able to better execute in 2020 and beyond if it had some earlier practice from meeting its original license buildout deadlines. After all, you can’t flex an undeveloped muscle.
Subscriber exodus
Even those who were willing to give Dish the benefit of the doubt on the build side shouldn’t have been blind to the cracks that began to show on the customer side as it tried to build a network.
Despite being handed a strong wireless brand in Boost Mobile and 9 million customers, Dish immediately began hemorrhaging subscribers. Some short term losses due to the transition – and the whole debacle where T-Mobile decided to shut off the CDMA network Dish relied on while it was building its own infrastructure – may have been expected. But the sheer scale of Dish’s subscriber flight should have raised red flags.
Between 2020 when it took over Boost Mobile and 2022, Dish lost 1.1 million subscribers. Things got so bad that Dish was reportedly thinking about divesting Boost by October 2022. A firm retail strategy to compete with long-established incumbents never really materialized. (Don’t even get me started on its handset issues.)
Dish’s losses continued fairly relentlessly through Q1 2026 – though with occasional bright spots – and it ended the quarter with a combined 7.53 million subscribers across both its Boost Mobile and Gen Mobile brands.
Why did we get here?
It’s debatable whether FCC Chairman Brendan Carr made the right move last year when he launched an investigation into Dish parent company EchoStar’s compliance with 5G buildout requirements. The debate is less about whether Dish deserved to be called out and more about Carr’s motivations for doing so (seemingly at the request of Elon Musk). There’s also the element of whether or not that move triggered the series of events (including the aforementioned spectrum sales) that led to Dish Wireless’ recent bankruptcy filing.
But it was always clear Dish would never really be a fourth Tier 1 carrier, and regulators should have seen that a mile away.
Its prior track record of missing spectrum buildout deadlines was the first clue that it couldn’t or wouldn’t live up to the task. How the FCC and Department of Justice (DoJ) turned a blind eye to this when considering the T-Mobile-Sprint deal is beyond me. How they then decided to ignore subsequent extension requests for fear of making themselves look bad is shameful. How they also shrugged off clear signs from consumers that Dish was doing something very wrong is laughable.
The whole point of propping up Dish was to benefit consumers by increasing competition. The DoJ, FCC and, heck, even the FTC under multiple administrations then proceeded to do *nothing* to ensure that outcome actually came to fruition.
The government itself needs to be held accountable for Dish’s flop. Because while Dish is absolutely responsible for its own failure, it is not the only one to blame. Perhaps a Congressional hearing or two or an incident autopsy report of sorts could help get to the bottom of it. And the FCC and DoJ should be required to implement administrative changes to ensure similarly bad decisions are avoided in the future.
And as always, it’s normal people who will be left holding the bag.
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