Dish Wireless: We’ll Meet June Deadline to Cover 70% of Americans With 5G
Dish remains on course to build the US’s first new nationwide wireless network in decades and will meet a June deadline to cover 70% of the country’s population with this greenfield 5G service, a company executive assured attendees of a telecom conference in Washington, D.C.
“We're going to get it done,” said Dave Mayo, EVP of network development at Dish Wireless(Opens in a new window), in a talk Wednesday afternoon at the industry trade group CTIA’s 5G Summit(Opens in a new window).
Dish, a subsidiary of the satellite-TV company Dish Network, acquired that mission and deadline as part of T-Mobile’s 2020 purchase of Sprint. Those two firms responded to early objections to the deal by pledging to divest Sprint’s Boost Mobile prepaid brand and sell wireless spectrum to Dish.
Dish then committed to combining those assets with spectrum purchased years earlier to build a new network and return a fourth nationwide service to the wireless landscape.
“We've built a standalone 5G network in record time,” Mayo said Wednesday. Dish met one commitment to the Federal Communications Commission by bringing service to 20% of the US population by last July, and now it has less than a month before its next major milestone.
“We have to have 70% of the country covered in some 28 days, and we'll meet that objective as well,” he said.
The agreement it struck with the FCC, as modified in September 2020(Opens in a new window), calls for it to cover “at least 70% of the population” in each “economic area,” an FCC geographic construct(Opens in a new window) that can look a bit like an oversized Congressional district. Mayo said this buildout will bring Dish to 15,000-plus cell sites, covering more than 235 million people.
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