Tag Archives: Dish

EchoStar Stays Alive

We are in the midst of what can only be considered as merger mania, a topic I covered in yesterday’s blog. One of the recently announced deals is the announcement that DirecTV is acquiring all video assets of EchoStar, which had just merged with Dish at the beginning of this year. This means that DirecTV will take on all of the Dish video customers along with Sling TV. As part of the merger, DirectTV is also taking on all of EchoStar’s debt.

This means several things for the industry. First, it means there will only be one satellite-based traditional video provider. DirecTV hasn’t said if it will continue to market under the Dish brand name, but the two satellite services will now be one. This will give the company the chance to consolidate and save costs. It also means that DirecTV will have a lot more cable customers and should have more leverage with programmers. Both DirecTV and Dish have been fighting with programmers to allow smaller video packages that people want. You might recall that DirecTV also currently serves the traditional AT&T cable customers.

The other interesting consequence of this is that it saves Charlie Ergen’s launch of Dish, the newest cellular company. Dish had been facing a $2 billion debt maturation next month, and many analysts predicted the company would have to enter bankruptcy. This gives Dish a clean balance sheet for the cellular business and provides the company with up to $5.5 billion in new debt headroom to complete the network and market its cellular services. The merger is not yet a done deal, and various creditors are being asked to take a haircut to help complete the transaction.

The press releases refer to the remaining Cellular company as EchoStar, and we’ll have to see if the cellular business keeps that brand name going forward.

It’s going to be interesting to watch Dish. The company spent $6 billion to meet its build-out commitments to the FCC. It’s estimated it will need a few billion more to meet the next coverage commitments in 2025.

Dish took a big chance on its original network design and pursued an open RAN architecture, which has the goal of using off-the-shelf generic hardware instead of the proprietary gear offered by the handful of industry vendors. The open RAN hardware has taken longer to perfect than hoped for, and the company ended up building a network that is a mix of open RAN and more traditional gear.

Dish has struggled. It acquired Boost Mobile and saw customers drop from 10 million to under 7.5 million. But the company seems poised to start attracting customers to it’s new 5G networks, which are likely wide open. I’ve been looking at the FCC cellular maps a lot lately, and I see Dish is in many markets like around my city, where it likely doesn’t yet have many customers.

It’s interesting how quickly the cellular industry has changed. The FCC required T-Mobile to support the launch of Dish as a term of T-Mobile’s merger with Sprint. At that time, just a few years ago, the FCC felt that the market would suffer without a replacement for Sprint. But since then, the big cable companies are aggressively selling cellular and migrating traffic to their own existing wireline networks. Other large ISPs and telcos other than AT&T and Verizon are exploring the cellular business plan as well.

One of the more interesting possibilities for Dish is to enter the fray in pursuit of FWA cellular broadband customers.

Concerns with the 5G Fund

The previous blog summarized the basics of the order for the new 5G Fund for Rural America that will provide $9 billion to improve rural cellular coverage. This blog looks at some concerns I identify with the order.

Are the Maps Accurate? The Rural Wireless Association (RWA), which represents smaller cellular companies, recently sent a letter to the FCC that claimed the FCC cellular maps are still highly inaccurate.It’s easy to check claimed cellular usage around you. Once you’ve loaded your address in the FCC map, look at the Mobile Broadband tab at the upper right. You will see the claimed cellular at your address or at any homes around you by clicking on locations.

I live in Western North Carolina, and rural cellular coverage around me is terrible – like is true for much of rural America. When I look at the rural cellular coverage around me on the FCC map it’s hard to find unserved areas. When I dig into the details of the map, I find a huge hodgepodge in rural areas where one carrier claims to serve each rural location – one cluster of homes might be deemed served due to T-Mobile, a nearby cluster deemed to be served by Dish, and another neighborhood claimed by AT&T. This mix of 35/3 Mbps 5G coverage in very rural areas seems unlikely.

An interesting complaint from RWA is that the FCC cellular reporting only looks at cellular coverage at homes. RWA argues that in rural areas, this is measuring the wrong thing – home cellular coverage is important, but cellular coverage should be measured along the roads where people drive every day. The current map shows no coverage data for areas between homes.

No Specific Public Map Challenge. The FCC is not pausing to give citizens and local governments a chance to challenge the cellular map. In fact, the FCC might only issue the final map of areas eligible for the funding 30 days before the auction begins.

This is a big oversight. If the RWA is right about poor maps, then the public should be given a chance to make sure that areas without adequate cellular coverage are included in the 5G Fund. It seems like the FCC thinks the public and local governments have had enough time to challenge the maps since the FCC started the BDC mapping process a few years ago.

The methodology need to challenge the maps is not easy. Speed tests to challenge can only be taken using the FCC speed test app. There must be a lot of tests in a given geographic area for tests to be considered. Speed tests must be taken either from a stationary place outside (like pulling over along the side of a road) or inside a home. Only the outdoor tests matter for the 5G Fund. To be done right, speed tests must be done using phones from all of the major carriers, meaning AT&T, T-Mobile, Verizon, Dish, and any local smaller carrier that offers decent coverage.

It’s basically impossible to challenge a carrier that has overstated coverage areas – you can’t conduct a speed test for a carrier that isn’t there. I note in rural North Carolina that there are a lot of places claimed as covered by Dish – but I’m highly dubious that there are many, if any, Dish subscribers in these areas who could take an FCC speed test to verify this. This is true for any carrier that is not really present – nobody is going to have a phone subscribed to a non-working service.

It’s unlikely that many county governments have undertaken a formal effort to organize the needed speed tests. And even if they did, that challenge has to have happened in the last year to be relevant. I work around the country, and in most of the rural counties I’ve worked in recent years, I’ve heard that cellular coverage is even worse than broadband coverage – and that’s saying something.

I don’t want to sound too critical of this plan because poor rural cellular coverage is a huge issue. This has been needed for a long time. But after having taken four years to get to this announcement, wouldn’t it make sense to take six more months to allow local governments to prove that cellular coverage is poor or that the FCC maps are inaccurate? The FCC does not want to repeat the dreadful problem it had with RDOF based on faulty maps. If the FCC rushes this through without the chance for a map challenge, it will feel like the agency is rushing to grab headlines. Doing this right is vital because communities that get missed by this upgrade are likely going to be stuck with poor cellular coverage for a decade or more.

Update on Dish Cellular

I recently checked on the status of Dish, which is trying to become the fourth major cellular company in the country. Dish entered the cellular business in 2020 as a consequence of the merger of Sprint and T-Mobile. Sprint already owned a lot of spectrum including 600 MHz and 700 MHz spectrum that covers most of the country, along with 1,700 MHz AWS spectrum that is the workhorse in cellular networks. Dish was also able to buy Sprint’s 800 MHz spectrum.

Dish was already under pressure at the time from the FCC to use its spectrum portfolio, and the FCC gave Dish until June 2023 to cover 70% of the U.S. population with cellular facilities. Dish got a jump on the business side of things by buying Boost Mobile for $1.1 billion.

Dish took a big chance on network construction and pursued an open RAN architecture, which has the goal of using off-the-shelf generic hardware instead of the proprietary gear offered by the handful of industry vendors. Dish ended up building a network that was a mix of open RAN and more traditional gear, but its attempt to use open RAN slowed network construction. However, Dish was able to meet its commitment to the FCC after having spent over $6 billion on the network. The company is expected to spend about $1 billion in 2024 and spend an additional $1 billion in the first half of 2025 to meet the next FCC commitment.

Dish struggled, and only has about 7.5 million customers left from its acquisition of 9 million Boost Mobile customers in 2020. The company has had little luck adding customers to the new network. Dish became authorized to sell the iPhone in late summer 2023, and hopes that will help sales.

A lot of analysts are pessimistic about Dish’s future, and some of them expect the company to eventually go bankrupt. However, Dish has the resources to make it until the end of 2026. Its chances were increased by a recent merger with Echostar, where Dish now has a minority position. Echostar had $2 billion in cash reserves that will buy time for Dish.

Some analysts think that Dish’s spectrum is worth more than its debts, and liquidation could result in net positive equity for Dish owners. However, the likely buyers are the three big cellular carriers, and there are challenges for each of them to buy more spectrum today. In fact, they are all sitting on excess spectrum, which is part of the reason they are all pursuing FWA wireless.

Dish is now at the point where the company needs to acquire customers. This is going to be a challenge in a market when the other three cellular carriers are all in full marketing mode. The big cellular companies are marketing heavily to stave off the large cable companies that have entered the cellular market.

Becoming a Dish customer is an interesting option for customers. There are a lot of advantages of being on a large empty network, something experienced by many in the first year when the other carriers opened their new 5G networks.

It would seem like a logical opportunity for Dish to pursue FWA home broadband like is being done by the other carriers. However, Dish has not constructed the extra antennas needed at its cell sites needed to support the home broadband product. Dish is interested in pursuing FWA using 12 GHz spectrum, and the FCC is investigating that use of the spectrum. Last summer, Dish considered buying some of the assets of UScellular, which are largely underutilized and deployed in rural areas where there is not a lot of other competition.

It’s going to be interesting to watch Dish for the next few years. Charlie Ergen has been often quoted as saying that he’s spent much of his career managing companies with his back to the wall, and he’s still optimistic that Dish can reach profitability. I think it’s still a little early to bet against him.

A Look at Open Ran

AT&T recently announced a $14 billion dollar deal with Ericsson to start upgrading its cellular networks to Open RAN (ORAN). I suspect most of the readers of this blog know a lot more about fiber technology than cellular technology. They’ve probably been seeing headlines for years talking about various flavors of RAN technology and probably wondered what it means. The bottom line is that the AT&T announcement is a big deal and means a big shift in the cellular vendor industry.

RAN stands for Radio Access Network, which is an acronym for the radios and antennas at a cell site. Open RAN represents a migration to a software-driven network where any brand of radio can be used at a cell site. This is a big deal in an industry where three major companies – Huawei, Ericsson, and Nokia – have made the gear for cellular networks. This means that most cellular networks rely entirely on the proprietary gear of a single vendor. A shift to Open Ran is akin to the migration a few years ago when data centers migrated to lower-cost white box routers and switches instead of having to buy proprietary gear from large vendors like Cisco.

However, the migration of the cellular network to generic hardware is a lot more complicated than making switches operate in a data center. This is mostly due to the complicated nature of operating a cell site in an environment where factors like temperature, precipitation, and customer traffic volume change the overall performance and operating characteristics of a cell site during the day. I always think of the old saying that operating a fiber network is science while operating a wireless network is art. The only solution for dealing with the complexities found at cell sites has been to pick an integrated suite of products from one vendor.

AT&T is the largest cellular carrier to announce it is moving towards ORAN. A few years ago, the newly formed DISH cellular effort announced it would use ORAN, but the technology was not ready, which drastically hindered the company’s initial launch of the network. The UK announced in 2021 that it has a goal to migrate its cellular networks to 35% Open RAN by 2030. The AT&T announcement doesn’t mean the company will be able to freely integrate any brand of radios into its networks but is a big first step towards true Open RAN.

The original view of Open RAN was that a cellular company could put any radio anywhere, connect it to the backhaul, and it would work. The software in the cloud would automatically handle the integration with the overall network and the surrounding cell sites, and the new site would work out of the box.

We’re still a long way from that ideal and may never fully get there. Cellular carriers have relied on the major vendors because they made sure that a cell site would work. I think back to all of the other launches of wireless technology where vendors released beta equipment and the first generation of customers were, unfortunately, the guinea pigs. I painfully recall watching ISPs try to launch wireless broadband networks using LMDS and MMDS spectrum and failing when the radios didn’t operate as promised.

Part of the reason that the migration to Open Ran has been slow is that vendors and carriers have also been pursuing other network options to cut costs. Historically, all of the electronics were fully integrated at a cell site. The RAN radio units were installed on a tower, and the BaseBand unit (BBU) with all of the brains was installed in a hut at the base of each tower. Technicians had to go through the time-consuming process of fine-tuning the electronics at each tower to meet the specific local circumstances.

In recent years, there have been efforts to consolidate some of the BaseBand Unit functions.

  • DRAN (Distributed RAN) was the first attempt to separate the base electronics from the radios. That was a lot harder than it might seem because a cellular tower relies on precise timing and fiddling with the type or length of wiring between the radios and the base caused all sort of problems.
  • CRAN (concentrated RAN) moved the base units into regional data centers (BBU hotels) and opened up the concept of DAS – Distributed Antenna Systems that would work from these centralized sites.
  • C-RAN (Cloud RAN), not to be confused with CRAN, has been a movement to move the entire brains of a cell site into data centers.

Open RAN takes something from each of these various evolutions and takes the final step of breaking the equipment monopoly of the big vendors. This isn’t going to be easy and has the danger of moving back to a time when we test new radios by foisting them on the public. But the savings from ORAN are potentially gigantic, and if we’ve seen anything in the wireless industry, it’s that the lowest-cost option is going to get the most attention.

The FCC’s 12 GHz Decision

One of the hardest things that the FCC does is to decide spectrum policy. The agency has full authority to determine the details of how we use each slice of available spectrum. Most importantly, the agency can determine who can use spectrum – and that’s why the task is challenging.

In the last decade, it’s hard to think of any spectrum deliberation and decision that didn’t have to weigh the interests of multiple spectrum users. There is almost always somebody using spectrum that must be considered. The FCC must decide if there is more national benefit in allowing others to use the spectrum, and in doing so, the FCC has to decide if the current users can somehow stay in place. If not, the FCC has to find existing users a new slice of spectrum and cover the cost of moving existing users to the new frequencies.

There are multiple users of spectrum that want more spectrum than they have today. Probably first on this list are the cellular carriers who say they need scads more spectrum to keep up with the demands of our connected world. Satellite carriers are now clamoring for spectrum as they continue to add more users onto satellite broadband – and as they contemplate launching IoT and cellular services. The U.S. government and the military insist on having bands of spectrum for a wide variety of uses. WISPs want more spectrum for rural broadband. The companies that make WiFi equipment want more free spectrum for public use. Then there are the important niche players like connected automobiles, GPS, weather satellites, etc.

Finally, as odd as it sounds, there are also investors who have purchased spectrum in the past and who lobby the FCC to increase the value of their ownership – only in America would this be one of the underlying reasons to deliberate on the use of spectrum.

The recent FCC decision on the use of the lower 12 GHz spectrum is a good example of the FCC deliberation process on spectrum. This spectrum sits in the middle of the range of spectrum that the FCC recently dubbed as 6G. This spectrum has great characteristics – it can carry a lot of data while still being transmitted for decent distances. In general, the higher the frequency, the shorter the effective distance of a broadcast transmission.

This spectrum has been used for satellite broadband connections. At the prompting of others in the industry, the FCC decided to investigate if there are other ways to use this spectrum to satisfy more national needs.

  • Dell owned a lot of the 12 GHz spectrum and was lobbying to expand the use of the spectrum to improve its value.
  • DISH was hoping to use the 12 GHz spectrum as part of its nationwide roll-out of a new cellular network.
  • The other big cell companies jumped in with the suggestion that the spectrum be sold at auction for FWA broadband.
  • WISPs jumped in and suggested they could coexist with the other users and use the spectrum for rural broadband.
  • The WiFi coalition asked that the spectrum be allowed for free indoor usage.

As is usual in FCC spectrum proceedings, the various parties all filed testimony from experts that demonstrated that their proposed use could work. In this case, many of the proposals tried to show that the FCC could order terrestrial use of the spectrum without interfering with satellite base stations. The experts on both sides of the argument said that the arguments on the other side were incorrect.

The spectrum engineers at the FCC are left to somehow glean the truth from the conflicting arguments. Meanwhile, the FCC commissioners have to wrangle with the policy and lobbying aspects of the issue since all of the players do their best to bring pressure to bear on such FCC decisions.

The FCC decision was that the lower 12 GHz spectrum should continue to be used for satellite backhaul. The big winner in the decision was Starlink, and the biggest loser was DISH.

But the FCC left the door open to other uses and will continue its investigation. The FCC is still interested in hearing more about the use for point-to-point and point-to-multipoint wireless connections. That would serve as backhaul between towers and could be used to connect FWA and WISP customers. The FCC is also willing to consider the free unlicensed use of the spectrum for indoor use. So, as is often the case, the debate continues.

The Upcoming Marketing Wars

In April 2019 my daughter and I were watching the NCAA final between Virginia and Texas Tech (and rooting for her school TTU). We noticed about halfway through the game that practically every ad we had seen was about 5G. Verizon was busy showing us speed tests from millimeter-wave cellphones receiving gigabit speeds. Not to be outdone, there were a ton of commercials also from T-Mobile and AT&T.

I found it extraordinary that the cellular carriers would spend that much money to buy premium-rate ads for a major sports event. We now know this was part of an all-out blitz on 5G to put pressure on Congress and the FCC to give them more spectrum.

I think that by this fall we’re going to wish we could go back to the 2019 level of ads because I’m predicting by this fall that all we’re going to hear about is cellular and broadband. A lot has changed in the industry since 2019. In more recent sporting events, I noticed that a lot of the ads were from the cable companies touting low-cost cellular service. The cable companies view bundling with cellular as one of the best ways to retain broadband customers – bundling means that when a customer drops broadband they will also lose cheap cellular service.

Dish network will be hitting the market sometime this summer, promising a rollout in a hundred smaller markets and 25 large markets in June. The company already owns Boost Mobile, but Dish is going to spend a lot of money to convince America to consider it for cellular service. This means mountains of advertising to make us aware that Dish is now a cellular company. Dish promises to be aggressive with pricing, so expect this advertising effort to set off a price war from the other carriers.

T-Mobile has already been blitzing the air this year in an attempt to sell its cellular broadband product. The company picked up 400,000 new cellular broadband customers in 2021, most at the end of the year. T-Mobile has a goal to pick up several million new broadband customers this year. T-Mobile’s ultimate goal is to reach 6 to 7 million FWA customers by 2025.

Verizon is also selling fixed wireless broadband and plans to hit the market hard later this summer. The company has a goal to reach 4 to 5 million FWA customers by 2025.

AT&T isn’t going to hit the national market with a push for FWA until some time in 2023, but there is no way that the company is going to sit by and watch the other cellular carriers lure away its customers. Expect AT&T to also be on the air nonstop.

It’s hard to think that national advertising this fall will be much more than cellular and political ads. I’m warning you now to find an outdoor hobby if you don’t want to hear any more about 5G.

We’re also going to see an unprecedented marketing blitz from cable companies and fiber overbuilders. All of the big telcos are furiously building fiber this year. There are aggressive plans to build fiber underway from AT&T, Verizon, Frontier, Windstream, Consolidated, Ziply, Lumen, and many smaller fiber builders. Much of the construction this year will be in cities and county seats, and that is going to mean a whole lot of advertising.

We’ve not seen a lot of national advertising about home broadband, and the marketing wars will likely be local. That’s going to translate to salespeople knocking on doors and a lot of mailers about fiber broadband.

There was some unexpected growth in cellular customers last year. For example, in the third quarter of last year, there was a net addition of 2.3 million new nationwide cellular customers. Industry analysts are chalking this up to businesses buying cell phones for remote employees and more students buying phones because of remote learning during the pandemic.

This kind of market growth is not sustainable since most people have cell phones. That means that the coming cellular marketing wars will largely be a zero-sum game. The only way for a cellular company to grow will be to take customers from another carrier. That’s going to lead to some real desperation – and even more ads. When you watch the first football game this fall, don’t say I didn’t warn you.