Dish’s Dave Mayo spoke at CTIA’s 5G Summit this week
WASHINGTON, D.C.—Dish Wireless has until June 30th to build out its 5G network to cover 70% of the U.S. population, with the deadline coming a year after the company had to meet a 20% coverage milestone in June 2022.
At CTIA’s 5G Summit this week, Dish’s EVP of Network Development Dave Mayo said that the company expects to meet that deadline.
“We have to have 70 percent of the country covered in some 28 days, and we will meet that objective,” Mayo said on Wednesday. In the course of its deployment thus far, he said that Dish has “learned a lot, from an O-RAN perspective” and that the company’s deployment has involved quite a bit of “pioneering” on various aspects.
“It took a lot of work to develop and get VoNR right, but we cover now 70 million POPs in the country, over 50 markets have a VoNR service that rides on our network,” Mayo said. (The device a consumer has determines whether or not they can even access VoNR; only a small number of cellular devices, notably Samsung’s Galaxy series since some S21 models and some smartphones from Oppo, are VoNR-capable at this point.)
He also emphasized the “record time” in which Dish has built its network. “Having better than 235 million covered POPs in just over three years is a pretty remarkable accomplishment,” Mayo said.
He also said that Dish’s network architecture is enabling it to operate in a substantially different way than legacy networks. “Sometimes we’re getting patches on a daily basis from our software vendors, and that’s very unlike … the way in which the legacy industry works. You may get a couple of software releases a year.” He praised Mavenir’s responsiveness in particular.
In terms of lessons learned, Mayo related that “When we first started this, we thought the vendors would all kind of work together. Quickly did we learn, that was not going to happen, and we became the system integrator. … It takes a little bit of a mind shift.”
On the operator’s most recent quarterly call, quite a bit of the conversation focused on Dish’s network deployment, the FCC deadline and spectrum issues. Charlie Ergen, Dish chairman, said that once the June deadline is met, the company expects capex intensity to take a bit of a “pause”, while it focuses on densification, optimization and filling in gaps rather than expanding to new markets.
Ergen also said that as capital-constrained Dish looks at opportunities beyond the consumer market that would be light on additional capex, one of the options is an approach in which “some of our partners in our build … Cisco or Dell or AWS come to mind, where they already have a big enterprise business that they just add our spectrum into their thinking about how they would design private networks.
“At that point, we would be more of a wholesale provider of spectrum,” he added.
Ergen and other execs also said that the company has been largely focused on its build-out in order to meet the FCC coverage deadline and that it will be ramping up marketing and distribution of its Boost Infinite product later this year as it focuses on expanding to the postpaid market. In preparation for that, Ergen noted, the company plans to start offering Apple’s iPhone “within the next few months.”
He went on to add that the company has a few more things that it needs to do, “and then I think we get to go a bit more on offense. It’s been a little bit frustrating to play defense as long as we have.”
“I think the market looks at us is half empty, maybe even 90% empty today, right?” he said at another point in the call. “And I think the truth is that the glass is more than half full, right?” He cited Dish’s longevity as a company, its experienced management team and ability to assess risk, its spectrum assets and its network. “We’re building a world-class network,” he reiterated. “There is not another network as advanced as ours, and it’s up and operating in 50 markets today and working.”
