FCC granted Dish permission to test in Yuma, AZ
The Federal Communications Commission has granted Dish Wireless permission to test 5G in low-band spectrum at 800 MHz in Yuma, Arizona—spectrum which it has an option to buy from T-Mobile US.
Dish is using 817-824 MHz/862-869 MHz, which may signal the company’s increasing interest in exercising its option to purchase a nationwide footprint in those airwaves for $3.59 billion. That section of the 800 MHz band is formerly Sprint (and formerly Nextel) spectrum which was the focus of a divestiture effort as part of the Department of Justice deal that allowed the T-Mo/Sprint merger to go through. Dish has the option to, within three years of the merger’s close, purchase that 800 MHz ESMR spectrum from T-Mobile US. Under a spectrum purchase agreement made as part of the deals related to Dish acquiring Sprint’s prepaid business and infrastructure access, Dish was expected to buy all of those 800 MHz spectrum licenses, totaling approximately 13.5 MHz of nationwide wireless spectrum.
The three-year anniversary of the close of the merger is coming up on April 1; the FCC STA filing notes that T-Mobile US is the current licensee in the band. The six-months STA began March 6 and runs through the end of the September.
If Dish walks away from the spectrum purchase, it has to pay a $72 million fee to T-Mobile US and $360 million to the U.S. government—but there was also a stipulation that Dish didn’t have to pay anything to the United States if it had deployed a core network and was offering 5G service to at least 20% of the U.S. population within three years of closing on its purchase of Sprint’s prepaid wireless business.
RCR Wireless News has reached out to Dish for comment and will update this story.
Company executives hinted on the most recent quarterly call that it was looking more likely that they would exercise the spectrum purchase option; in the company’s fourth-quarter financials, the value of the option was revised upwards, and Dish indicated that the likelihood that it would exercise the option had increased.
“The probability that we would exercise [the purchase option] has increased,” said Dish CFO Paul Orban, while Chairman Charlie Ergen said that there were “positive developments in terms of a return on that spectrum.”
