Dish Reveals First Coverage Maps, 'Boost Infinite' Brand

pcmag.com:

Dish showed its first coverage maps for 2022 and 2023 at its analyst's day yesterday, showing where people will be able to get the new "Boost Infinite" branded service on the first new, nationwide cellular network the US has seen in decades.

Coverage will start in mid-2022 with cities like Kansas City, St. Louis, Detroit, Omaha, and Syracuse, avoiding the nation's most heavily populated coastal areas. By 2023, all of the continental US's major cities will be covered, with great swathes of native coverage around Chicago and from New Hampshire down to Washington DC. Other parts of the country will be covered through roaming agreements with AT&T and T-Mobile, EVP of network deployment Dave Mayo said at the event.

The rollout is driven by FCC mandates to cover 20% of the US population by mid-2022 and 70% by 2023, Mayo said. Following Dish's attention to cost, that means focusing on where the people are. By 2025, Dish plans to cover 80% of the population of the country, but will only be able to cover a third of the square mileage. It'll pick up the rest with its 10-year AT&T roaming agreement.

"The AT&T roaming agreement complements out FCC mandate and gives us a nationwide footprint out of the gate," Mayo said. "We will prioritize areas where it makes the most financial sense first."

Dish emphasized that its strategy is to build the network fast, cheap, and very much under control. Almost all of its cell sites are co-located with other carriers, preventing the need for real estate acquisition, Mayo said. The carrier's use of "open RAN" and virtualization means that it loads less hardware per site, and what it does load is much more easily upgradeable through software than other carriers' systems are, he said.

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