Dish Says Its 5G Network is Running in Vegas, With Tweaks Needed

Dish Network's mobile 5G network is up and running in Las Vegas, albeit with mixed results, and the company will easily meet its June goal of reaching 20% of the U.S. population, executives said Thursday, announcing its 2021 year-end results. "When it works, it works pretty well," Chairman Charlie Ergen said. He said network optimization and working with handset manufacturers to ensure Dish frequencies are in their hardware are still to be done before broad commercial launch, plus fixing of some regulatory issues like Enhanced 911 access.

Dish and T-Mobile have reached agreement resolving their dispute over shuttering T-Mobile's 3G CDMA network that supports T-Mobile's planned March 31 shutoff date, Ergen said. He said the agreement needs FCC and DOJ approval. The commission and T-Mobile didn't comment. Ergen said the companies were working together to tackle handset supplies and other issues. AT&T will remain Dish's primary vendor, but the future relationship with T-Mobile "will be much brighter," he said. Dish Wireless Chief Operating Officer John Swieringa said Dish is offloading a lot of its Boost mobile and Republic wireless traffic onto AT&T's network.

Las Vegas is six months behind where it should be due to technical issues and more work than anticipated in system integration, Ergen said. "We're moving at a very fast pace now," he said. He said with about $3.5 billion spent so far on the national 5G network, Dish is "on a cadence of so many towers [being built] per month" through 2025 and total costs will likely be close to the estimated $10 billion. The parts of the Las Vegas network that have been optimized are having good speeds and operation "but the whole city hasn't been optimized," Ergen said.

The company needs to be better at getting and keeping DBS and Sling subscribers, CEO Erik Carlson said. During the most-recent quarter, Dish TV lost 200,000 subs due to a November price increase and the now-settled programming dispute with Tegna (see 2202090043), he said. Sling lost 70,000 subscribers in the quarter, but the re-engineering platform and interface should bring new features that should grow subscribership, he said. Dish's prepaid wireless business lost 245,000 subscribers in the quarter, with supply chain disruptions meaning big cellphone shortages, he said. Dish said it ended 2021 with 8.2 million Dish TV subscribers, down 600,000 year over year; 2.5 million Sling subscribers, about flat year over year; and 8.6 million wireless subscribers, down 500,000 year over year. Dish stock closed at $29.46, up 6.9%.

Dish "potentially" could begin providing fixed wireless access, Ergen said. He said that would be an opportunity to maximize its bandwidth use, which is the key to being a viable wireless provider. He said rural areas might be "a logical place to start" offering fixed wireless instead of mobile service. Dish is already active in offering private networks, acting as a subcontractor in a contract awarded to Lockheed Martin for a network for the Marines Corps' Camp Pendleton in California, and other private network announcements are coming, said Dish Chief Commercial Officer Stephen Bye.

Ergen said getting adjacent 3.45 GHz and citizens broadband radio service spectrum in those auctions was a win for the company because that contiguous block will support both its consumer network and private enterprise network businesses. He said the CBRS spectrum will be the primary band for private networks because it can be deployed quickly. He said Dish paid a premium to get adjacent spectrum. And with AT&T being adjacent to Dish in most of the U.S., there's an opportunity for the companies to partner on C band and CBRS, he said. Such private networks will be commonplace among Fortune 500 companies within a handful of years, Ergen said. He said Dish's role could include merely leasing its capacity or building out such networks alone or with partners.

U.S. spectrum regulators should "take a hard look" at increasing CBRS spectrum power levels, Ergen said. He said the U.S. power limits put the U.S. at a disadvantage globally since other nations don't have such a low-power band in the middle of the C band. He said midpower CBRS and high-power C band can coexist.

Ergen again called a Dish/DirecTV combination "inevitable" (see 2011060043). Without one, "both companies will just melt away," he said, saying there aren't regulatory reasons to block a deal. He said the Tegna dispute was "a lose-lose' for the two companies, with Dish losing subscribers and Tegna losing capital, but it proved Dish can weather a major network blackout during football season.