Dish missed every 5G commitment it made in 2021

Dish Network started and now ends 2021 without a 5G network, despite multiple commitments to the contrary that were eventually scrapped more than halfway through the year.

The aspiring greenfield operator repeatedly moved the goalposts throughout 2021 and still ended the year without a single score. Multiple top executives at Dish made pledges this year, just like last year, that were never met.

Indeed, for much of the last two years, Dish claimed it would have 5G service deployed in that respective year in at least one U.S. city.

Dish chair and co-founder Charlie Ergen in early 2021 said 5G service would be available in one U.S. market by the end of September. Barely two months later, company brass claimed its yet-to-be-released 5G service would be live in multiple U.S. cities before the end of the year.

That was later narrowed to one city, Las Vegas, and again Dish Network failed to deliver. Company executives walked back on these pledges consistently, and some started leaning on ambiguous language in the final months of the year to create even more wiggle room leading into 2022.

In early November, Ergen said a beta service would be up and running in Las Vegas a month later. “People will probably try to get to experience a part of our network then,” he said. “We should have been a little faster on rollout in Las Vegas. I mean, I think that’s fair. But I think other than that, most everything else we’re doing probably better than we anticipated.”

What he didn’t say is that “beta” would be limited to employees and some “friendly” users — in other words, a mostly internal test of a fledgling network. Dish claims it delivered on that promise, but it hasn’t shared anything beyond words to back that up.

It remains unclear how long this beta testing program will run before 5G service is commercially available in Las Vegas, or other U.S. cities. Dish claims the beta will last for at least 90 days, and its latest commitment leaves open the possibility it could run the beta for nearly 150 days.

Las Vegas encounters 5G delays
Dish’s Las Vegas market launch was delayed by the work required to get its open radio access network (RAN) and core network software working together with reliable performance, Dave Mayo, EVP of network development, said during the company’s most recent earnings call in early November.

“We’re in beta test mode, and we’ll progress that over the course of the next 90 days, and look forward to launching Vegas sometime in the first quarter of 2022,” he said.

The consistency of these unfulfilled promises amplify questions about Dish’s ability to meet obligations imposed by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) and how much money it will cost Dish to achieve its long-coveted spot in the wireless space.

The company maintains it can build a nationwide 5G network running on cloud-native, open RAN architecture with $10 billion in cumulative capex. “That’s what it takes to build a network and we’re doing it infinitely less expensive than anybody’s ever done it before,” Ergen said on the company’s third-quarter of 2021.

Dish certainly isn’t being shy about spending money to prove itself as a wireless network operator. It spent almost $281 million on 5G network property and equipment purchases during the quarter, bringing the total spent on 5G network infrastructure through the first nine months of the year to $527 million.

Where’s all that money going? Mayo claimed Dish initiated 300 cell site construction starts in the last week of October, and said that number will continue to grow for a few months before stabilizing in 2022.

Clock ticking on FCC requirements
Dish also secured building permits on two-thirds of the sites required to meet its June 2022 population coverage requirements set by the FCC, and started construction on well over 30% of those sites, Mayo added.

The 70% population coverage obligation that hits in 2023 will effectively require Dish to provide service in every U.S. city with a population greater than 500,000 people. The 20% coverage milestone Dish faces in seven months will include metropolitan areas with less red tape.

Before all that happens, Dish still has to prove it can build and run a 5G network in Las Vegas, a common testbed market for new technologies that ride on spectrum.

Until then, Dish’s top executives will be limited to talking about their first-of-its-kind network without anything to show for it. SDxCentral