SRG’s testing said that erratic voice, downlink speeds have improved
What difference has a year made in Dish Wireless’ network performance in its inaugural market? Better voice quality and faster downlink speeds, according to recent testing and analysis from Signals Research Group.
SRG first tested Dish’s network in Vegas in 2021 during its pre-commercial phase, then again in mid-2022—at which point it concluded that there was plenty of room for improvement, and that while downlink performance was “reasonably good,” there was a significant amount of inconsistency and unpredictability in both voice performance and how well things like carrier aggregation worked.
In 2023, however, with another year of network development and optimization under Dish’s belt, SRG found that while there are still “opportunities for improvement,” Dish has both a denser network grid and a “better implementation of downlink carrier aggregation” that includes support for three component carriers. Erratic voice quality scores that were evident a year ago, even while stationary, are now “much better than in 2022,” SRG said—and this time, the devices remained consistently on Dish’s 5G SA network during Voice over NR drive testing, and using a scanner, SRG saw “quite good coverage across all the Dish Wireless spectrum assets.” Last year, devices fell back to AT&T’s network during testing.
SRG noted that Dish’s 5G Standalone network in Vegas relies on Mavenir as the CU and DU vendor and Fujitsu as the RU vendor—although SRG doesn’t call it an “Open RAN” network per se, rather a “multi-vendor RAN deployment … as deployed by DISH Wireless.”
The testing firm used two Motorola edge+ smartphones and two Samsung Galaxy A23 smartphones to collect data, including a view of the application layer and chipset performance data.
SRG said that better downlink performance was the “clear highlight with drastically improved performance” compared to last year’s testing. “On a few occasions we had to convince ourselves the observed performance was real,” the testing and consulting firm said.
Still, there remains room for improvement in the greenfield network, both in voice quality and in data performance, Signals Research said. Uplink performance in data tests was “subpar” and Dish’s VoNR didn’t perform quite as well T-Mobile US’ 5G SA network and its implementation of VoNR in the same market—and that was with a very lightly loaded network, according to SRG’s analysis.
More details from SRG here.
