‘Nothing’ Stopping Dish From Building ‘Best’ 5G Network in US, Says Ergen
Dish Network is making “very steady progress” on its 5G network buildout, and its commitment to open radio access network (O-RAN) “architecture” (see 2002190048) is “the most important thing” about the deployment, said Chairman Charlie Ergen on a Q2 call Friday: “We’re the only company in the United States that we know of that’s doing that from a clean sheet of paper.”
“Nothing” is stopping Dish from building the “best network” in the U.S., said Ergen. There’s “no law of physics” to overcome, it’s really execution,” he said. “It’s not reinventing science.” Dish doesn’t spend a lot of time talking about the buildout “externally because everybody’s going to be skeptical until we light it up, and then people will have their opinion,” he said.
“It’s pretty much all come together for us,” said Ergen of planning for the 5G deployment. “We have our senior team in place. We know exactly what we need to do.” Dish continues discussions with several more vendors, he said: “There are more that we need to help us to get to where we need to go.” Potential vendors need to “share the vision and take some risks with us to get there,” he said. More than 100 companies responded to requests for proposals, he said. “We’re down to two or three potential vendors for each category that we have left.”
The company has “very good skill sets” in satellite and video, said Ergen. It’s now also “incredibly skilled in O-RAN cloud-based architecture for the next generation of telcos,” he said. “We’re unique in that sense.”
Everything about Dish’s “core strategy” in 5G “is better than it was last year, and it was better last year than the year before,” said Ergen. “The technology shift is dramatic. It’s not understood by most people. It reminds me of digital. We were doing digital compression when people thought it was impossible.”
Having closed on the Boost Mobile acquisition July 1 (see 2007010017), Dish will break out the segment for the first time when it releases Q3 results in November, said Chief Financial Officer Paul Orban. Key “metrics,” including average revenue per user, will be disclosed then, he said.
Dish doesn’t yet have “a full month of billing information” on Boost to comment on recent performance, said Ergen. “We are flying a little bit blind.” Dish will have “a lot of information on that next quarter because we’ll actually have financials,” he said. Since “we have to pay T-Mobile for the network,” the margins on Boost will be low “until you get owner economics on your own network,” he said. “Then the margins are quite good, so we have to pivot.”
COVID-19 lockdowns enabled Dish TV to slow subscriber attrition. Net video subscribers decreased by 40,000 compared with 79,000 in net sub decreases in the 2019 quarter. Sling net subscribers decreased about 56,000 vs. net increase of 48,000. Sling's decline was “disappointing,” said CEO Erik Carlson. He blamed heightened streaming competition and the absence of live sports.
Dish acquired “just under” 257,000 Ting Mobile subscribers in an “earn-out” deal when it picked Tucows last week as a technology partner for its retail wireless business (see 2008030002), said Tucows CEO Elliot Noss on a quarterly call Thursday. Transferring the Ting Mobile subs frees Tucows to focus on its mobile services enabler (MSE) business, of which Dish became the first customer. “While we will be deeply focused for the next while on making Dish happy, longer term we plan to use our MSE platform to serve additional customers beyond Dish,” he said.
The CEO “could not be happier with this pivot” because it means “we stop spending money to acquire new subscribers,” he said. It eliminated “our single greatest weakness” as a company with the disadvantageous Ting Mobile “cost structure,” he said. The financial metrics were making it “increasingly difficult for us to compete” in the wireless space “that was going to see even greater competition with Dish’s entrance,” he said.