Dish Works Toward Expanding Satellite Broadband Service, Seeks to Keep Uplink Position
Dish Network plans to sell a fixed and mobile broadband service across the country, executives said Tuesday at the company’s Washington office. Satellite is the best way to deliver video to the U.S., said Jeff Blum, Dish deputy general counsel. “Consumers want more than a fixed linear video experience,” he said. “They want fixed and mobile voice, video and data.” The service is an effort to offer more data capacity and decrease latency, he said. Dish separately sought to keep its current uplink mobile satellite service spectrum as-is, when it gets a waiver to provide satellite broadband terrestrially (CD Sept 25 p1). Sprint Nextel wants a shift to protect the H block of spectrum that may be auctioned.
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Dish recently deployed the Exede broadband service, through a partnership with ViaSat, Blum said. This year, Dish plans to expand its capabilities with service from its EchoStar XVII satellite, he said. Both services will soon be incorporated under one brand, said Alison Minea, counsel for Dish. Dish plans to allow its subscribers to bundle satellite broadband with satellite TV, she said. It also will offer discounted prices, she added. “This gives us a chance to be competitive with other pay-TV providers."
Having FCC Connect America Fund support would incent the company to launch more satellites for broadband service, Blum said. “There’s nothing in the universal service fund order that excludes satellite, but they haven’t issued rules on the main fund yet.” The FCC should avoid setting artificial latency requirements that would affect satellite companies, he said. He also said Dish plans to include in its packages of products a DSL service made possible through its acquisition last year of Liberty Bell.
Dish continued to push back against Sprint’s request to have the DBS company’s S-band uplink shifted from 2000-2020 MHz to 2005-2025 MHz. Sprint had said it supports Dish’s intent to deploy terrestrial broadband services, but it urged the FCC not to permit Dish “to cast emissions from its mobile satellite service spectrum into the adjacent-channel H Block in a manner that impairs use of the H Block for mobile broadband” (http://xrl.us/bnrd22). The Sprint letters “are silent on the significant new interference issues that would be created by shifting the AWS-4 band up 5 MHz,” Dish said in a new filing in docket 12-70 (http://xrl.us/bnrdqf). Sprint’s silence on the key timing and interference issues related to changes to the AWS-4 band plan “underscores that there is no public policy benefit to Sprint’s self-serving proposals,” Dish said.
Sprint continues to support Dish obtaining terrestrial authority in the S-band, said a wireless industry executive. Where the two companies have a difference of opinion is that Dish seems to want to use the H block as a guard band, but the company didn’t buy that block, the executive added. When there are two different bands adjacent to each other, as is the case for Dish’s uplink and the H block, “you usually like to try to get some spectral separation between them,” the executive said: Sprint’s urged the FCC to impose “sufficient limitations on Dish at the beginning of their band, so that the H block is not flooded with their interference, making it unusable."
The effect that an uplink shift would have on the terrestrial service rollout is a question of how far along Dish is in the 3rd Generation Partnership Project standard-setting process, said a satellite industry executive. The executive works for neither company and is watching the FCC 2 GHz proceeding. Dish said it would have to restart the 3GPP process if its uplink is moved, the executive noted. “Whether you buy this or not depends on your view of whether they're right on being held up and whether that’s a problem.”