Dish Wireless met its goal to cover 20% of the U.S. population with its new 5G network on June 14, going live in 120+ markets. But there wasn’t much time to celebrate the milestone. Dave Mayo, EVP of network deployment, did take seven seconds to spike a football and post the moment on LinkedIn. But that’s about all the time the company has to spare because it must immediately look to its next goal to cover 70% of the U.S. population by June 2023. And after that, it must cover 75% of the population in each Partial Economic Area by June 2025.
Speaking with Fierce this week, Dish Wireless President and COO John Swieringa said, “We’re focusing now on building out the coasts to achieve 70%.”
Swieringa, who was promoted to President and COO of the wireless business in January, not only leads the deployment of the 5G network, but he also kept his prior responsibilities as head of Dish Wireless' retail business.
Asked what Dish’s marketing strategy is, Swieringa said the company is putting “one step in front of the other.”
“The thing I’m most focused on is working to deploy the network in a way that we can quickly move into monetizing our investments,” he said. “This is the year we start to unleash that value. We’re moving from being an MVNO and a large technology project to a fully-integrated business.”
The company has hired more than 1,600 employees, and it’s recruiting for an additional 500. Many of these folks are in sales, marketing and product management.
But when asked what Dish’s exact plans are to start getting the word out about its 5G network in order to garner subscribers, he said, “I’d prefer not to telegraph our strategy.”
Dish does have the benefit of already owning retail stores for its Boost Mobile prepaid service. And it recently announced its postpaid brand, Boost Infinite, which it anticipates launching in the fourth quarter.
However, the most recent report about prepaid wireless from Wave7 Research said Boost has 4,670 stores and has been closing stores at a rate of 20+ per month. Wave7 principal Jeff Moore has previously noted that Boost targets a lower economic demographic, and Boost stores are not in the same type of upscale locations as the retail stores of major postpaid brands from AT&T, Verizon and T-Mobile.
Swieringa noted that Dish is expanding the presence of its prepaid brands, including at Best Buy and Target locations. And he added that future plans include using, “all our retail” to “load subscribers on our 5G network.”
Currently, Dish has about 8.2 million subscribers using its prepaid MVNO services, which ride on T-Mobile’s and AT&T’s networks.
Signing up new 5G subscribers
Swieringa didn’t want to say how many people had signed up for Dish’s new greenfield 5G network, which only went live on June 14 — less than two weeks ago.
On June 15, The Verge posted an article that was pretty unflattering to Dish. A Verge reporter chronicled his experience attempting to sign up for Dish’s 5G service via Dish's Project Genesis website, and he suffered through a lot of glitches.
“We started to turn up the site ahead of our full announcement,” said Swieringa. “Some users accessing the site ahead of time had varying experiences as we made all our markets available. We’re happy where the site is now and how it’s performing.”
The Verge reporter told Fierce that his troubles attempting to sign up occurred on June 14, but he did notice that Dish had fixed a few of the glitches by the afternoon of the 15th.
Devices
When the first Dish 5G market went live — in Las Vegas — the available smartphone to work on the network was the Motorola Edge+, a premium phone that cost $899.99.
But for potential subscribers who go to the Project Genesis website now, they’re offered either the Samsung Galaxy S22 for $399.99 or the Netgear Nighthawk M6 Pro hotspot for $349.99. The hotspot is touted as a way to “keep your entire family connected to 5G over Wi-Fi for up to 32 devices.”
When analysts questioned Dish after the Las Vegas launch about the expensive Motorola Edge+, Dish executives said the limited handset offering was related to its unique combination of spectrum, and especially its Band 70 spectrum.
This week Swieringa said, “We expect Band 70 devices in the fourth quarter.” But he indicated that devices are also a challenge because Dish’s new network is a 5G standalone (SA) network.
He alluded to the fact that T-Mobile has the same dilemma with getting devices to support its 5G SA network with Voice over New Radio (VoNR).
This issue was recently discussed by Gordon Mansfield, AT&T’s VP of Mobility & Access Architecture. According to Mansfield, the current devices in the market can handle the 5G network, but if they are constantly using a 5G SA network, that may impact device battery life. He said original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) are working to improve the power efficiency of new phones for 5G SA networks.
Swieringa added, “We are the first to offer 5G SA with Voice over New Radio. It requires a different configuration on the device. You couldn’t just carry a device from AT&T and Verizon onto our network.”
Dish Wireless phones will also support eSIM, which is something that Dish Chairman Charlie Ergen has always promised and is part of the Consent Decree with the Department of Justice when it agreed to the T-Mobile/Sprint/Dish agreement. When the majority of smartphones have eSIM built in, customers will be able to more easily switch from one provider to another. They won’t have to go to the trouble of switching out physical SIM cards. Swieringa said, “eSIM will broadly reduce the friction of switching. Dish as a carrier will benefit given that we have far less customers.”
Finally, New Street Research has estimated that Dish’s new wireless network covers just 125,000 square miles with less than 4,000 cell sites. But Swieringa would not confirm any specifics. He said Dish is due to make a July 14 filing with the FCC about its 20% network buildout.