Dish Falling Behind on 5G, Open RAN: Strand Consult

Dish Network appears to be behind schedule, both in its deployment of 5G and on its move to an open radio access network, said John Strand of Strand Consult after Dish said it's live in Las Vegas (see 2205040057). “With regard to the announcement that they made in relation to the Samsung agreement, it seems that they have had to admit that they cannot meet their deadline with OpenRAN,” Strand emailed Thursday. “They bought Samsung’s [virtual RAN] solution with a promise that it will be OpenRAN compliant at some point,” he said: “Virtualization and cloudification are the global trends. The challenge for OpenRAN players is to achieve the mix and match of vendors while ensuring performance. The OpenRAN optimization for substitutability, energy consumption, network performance, and security has yet to be proven whereas classic 3GPP [3rd Generation Partnership Project] network elements deliver that today. Dish’s story of mixing and matching vendors is not yet a reality.” Strand sees broader challenges ahead. The U.S. remains “an exciting 5G market with dynamism across the value chain,” but “there is no new US spectrum on the table and the FCC’s spectrum authority is about to expire, so policymakers need to step up if the US is to sustain its advantage,” he said.