Dish Says 70% Milestone in Sight, Big Retail Ramp Up by Year's End
Dish Network is on track to reach its 70% coverage June milestone, and thus won't be subject to possible FCC fines, Chairman Charlie Ergen said Thursday as the company announced its Q4 2022 results. An aggressive commercial launch of its Infinite Boost postpaid mobile service will take a little longer, though, because there's about a six-month lag between a tower providing data coverage and being optimized to provide 5G voice service, he said.
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Reaching the FCC-set 70% milestone also "takes any chance of taking our spectrum back off the table," Ergen said.
Dish is starting close to 1,000 tower sites a month to meet the milestone, with each taking three to four months before it's operational, said Dave Mayo, executive vice president-network development. Once that 70% coverage is achieved, Dish's pace of tower building will slow, Ergen said. Its focus then will be on optimizing its presence in markets where it is and filling in coverage gaps, he said.
Dish has 12 major markets with full commercial 5G voice over new radio (VONR) coverage and it's loading existing mobile customers onto its 5G network now, Dish Wireless President John Swieringa said. Those include Dallas, Houston, Las Vegas and Cleveland, he said. The network supports Motorola and Samsung devices, and loading them clears the path for working with Apple to get it certified, he said. "We can really hit the gas [on Infinite Boost] when we get devices onto our network in our markets," he said. By this time next year, VONR coverage will be available throughout that 70% coverage footprint, he said.
Even before Dish's 5G network is voice optimized, the company's postpaid voice business will go nationwide, relying often on AT&T or T-Mobile coverage, Ergen said.
Asked about Dish's option to buy T-Mobile's 800 MHz spectrum for $3.6 billion, Ergen called the spectrum "a nice-to-have, not a must-have. ... There's no downside to doing nothing."
Ergen said cloud-based networks are going to be "a necessity" for wireless carriers to get into enterprise. Noting T-Mobile's partnership with Amazon Web Services (see 2302210035), he said multiple telcos will sign up with Amazon or other cloud providers to run their cores as precursors to launching private networks. Dish's wireless network is designed for enterprise and wholesale, with notable revenue from those expected to start in 2024, he said. Dish conceivably could get 25% market share there -- far more than it expects to in retail wireless, where there's well-established competition, he said.
Dish ended Q4 with 7.4 million direct broadcast satellite subscribers, down 800,000 year over year, and 2.3 million Sling streaming subs, down 150,000. It had 8 million wireless subscribers, down 500,000. Q4 revenue was $4 billion, down $400 million year over year.
Dish's Boost prepaid business is shrinking quickly, and that comes atop what will likely be big spending for the launch of the postpaid Infinite Boost, MoffettNathanson's Craig Moffett wrote investors. "Rather than providing funding for 5G, Boost is now just another hole in the bucket," he said.
"Another difficult quarter" for Dish's wireless business with subs down and churn up, while its pay TV business is similarly "down across the board," Recon Analytics' Roger Entner tweeted.