Dish Playing Catch Up on 5G, Is Serious on Launching

Dish Network is serious about building a 5G network, said Executive Vice President Network Development Dave Mayo at the Wireless Infrastructure conference Wednesday, streamed from Orlando. A T-Mobile veteran, Mayo said since he joined in June 2020, Dish has put in place the building blocks for a cloud-native, open radio access network. The company faces a June deadline to cover 20% of the U.S. population, 70% a year later.

It took T-Mobile 12 years and “four pretty big acquisitions” to build a nationwide network “and we’re going to do it in three years, completely organically,” Mayo said: “What a Herculean task.” Dish can only do that by keeping things simple, with a “big build program” that will run four years, he said. Dish starts with more than 100 MHz, the 9 million customers it got by acquiring Boost as part of T-Mobile buying Sprint, and also bought Republic Wireless, he said.

Dish plans field tests in Las Vegas in November, Mayo said, and has started construction in 32 markets. Some big East Coast markets have been the slowest to get started, he said: “It’s all coming together.”

Mayo divided the U.S. into four regions, 36 market areas, with the New York and Los Angeles markets each divided in half because they’re too big to serve with a single team. Dish’s approach before he got there was to centralize control based on its experience as a satellite company, he said. Mayo’s reaction was “this is a major disconnect, because that’s not going to work,” he said: “We’ve got a problem.”

Dish hadn’t picked a radio, Mayo said. “We picked an antenna, I think my first week, and started working on radio designs,” he said. By mid-December, Dish had a standard design for the initial rollout using Fujitsu equipment, he said.

Mayo also had to negotiate collocation deals on a compressed timeline with the major tower companies. Putting a team together has been a challenge during this pandemic, he said. Dish is building all its own equipment cabinets, at retrofitted warehouses that had been refurbishing satellite TV gear, he said.

Mayo said he also had to sell the market on the idea that Dish really was building a 5G network. “Folks just didn’t believe we were going to do this,” he said. Mayo said he was skeptical during his initial interview with Chairman Charlie Ergen. Ergen said “yeah, we’re doing it,” he said. Mayo said he learned a lesson from former T-Mobile CEO John Legere: “You’ve got to tell a story as to where you’re going and if you tell the story well, people will go.”

Dish’s network will allow big customers to keep the data they collect on premise, without going across the network, Mayo said. That’s something big companies want and other carriers will have trouble duplicating, he said. Mayo declined comment on Dish’s fight with T-Mobile on the carrier’s decision to shutter next July its CDMA network, used by Boost customers (see 2109210040).

During a Tuesday discussion, Kurt Jacobs, JMA Wireless vice president-federal markets, said DOD is investing in 5G “not only for DOD use, but … to help set the stage for 5G leadership.” The Pentagon wants to make more use of commercial wireless, he said: “They want to get away from the $600 hammer and the special use. There’s budget concerns, but also to be able to do things faster … and bring that commercial technology in-house much quicker.”

DOD is “the largest enterprise customer in the world,” said Sal D'Itri, Federated Wireless general manager-government business. No other business would invest $600 million “right off the bat in 5G innovation” as the department has in the 5G-to-XG program, he said. “They are pushing go faster, innovate faster, be agile,” he said: “There’s more and more of this to come.” DOD sees apps as driving the network, which is a big change from 4G, he said.