Dish has six months to complete drive testing to confirm its network speeds
The Federal Communications Commission has confirmed to Dish Wireless that it has met its 5G build-out requirements and two of three related commitments, with one set of test results still pending to see if Dish is meeting network speed requirements.
Dish Wireless told the FCC in mid-June that it had met its build-out requirements, which were central to both Dish continuing to hold onto its spectrum licenses as well as central to the approval of the Sprint/T-Mobile US merger, which included some divestitures that helped establish Dish as a fourth facilities-based competitor in the U.S. market.
Now the FCC has confirmed that Dish has indeed met the required milestones, as it claimed. In a letter, Joel Taubenblatt, chief of the FCC’s Wireless Telecommunications Bureau, wrote that the WTB specifically found that:
-In the 600 MHz band, Dish has met its commitments to deploy a core network and offer 5G broadband service to at least 70% of the U.S. population
2) In the AWS-4 and AWS H block licenses, Dish had to offer 5G service to at least 70% of the U.S. population, which was analyzed on a band-specific basis.
3) For Dish’s 700 MHz licenses, it has met the requirement to offer 5G service to at least 70% of the population covered by those licenses.
“We likewise find that Dish met the contingency for automatic, two-year extensions of its final construction milestones—until June 14, 2025—for each of its AWS-4, AWS H Block, and 700 MHz E Block licenses,” the letter said.
Dish’s nationwide 5G commitments included that it would deploy a nationwide 5G network that had at least 15,000 sites deployed, with at least 30 megahertz of Dish’s download 5G spectrum averaged over all Dish 5G sites deployed nationwide, and that at least 70% of its covered POPs would have access to average download speeds of 35 Mbps or greater.
The WTB letter said that Dish has met the first two of those commitments. The bureau also approved Dish’s proposed methodology for a drive-testing campaign that will determine whether the operator’s new, nationwide network is meeting that 35 Mbps speed minimum.
Dish has six months to complete the drive-testing and submit the results to the FCC.
