Should You Switch to Dish's New $30 5G Network? We Test It in 3 Cities

pcmag.com:

Dish is doing something that hasn't been done in decades, and some things that have never been done before. We took an exclusive trip to three new Dish "Project Genesis" cities to see how the company is building the first new nationwide cell phone network in decades.

Under the gimlet eye of the FCC, the former satellite-TV company is the first new nationwide carrier in the US this century. It's doing this with odds and ends of spectrum and using a flexible, mix-and-match network setup that no one outside Japan has pulled off before.

Dish was required to launch its service covering 20% of the US population by June 14, and at the end of that day, it started selling its "Project Genesis" in more than 120 cities. So we hopped on a bus to hit three of them—Ithaca, Syracuse, and Utica in New York—with a retail Samsung Galaxy S22 we purchased from Dish.

For now, Dish has one phone—a $399.99 Galaxy S22—and one service plan, a $30 "unlimited everything" plan. The carrier also sells a hotspot, the Netgear Nighthawk M6, with a $20 plan.

These smaller cities show Dish's unusual focus, and the true potential for what it can add to the US wireless landscape. Smaller cities don't often get new technologies first, but Dish is putting places like Ithaca (pop. 40,000) and Utica (pop. 60,000) front and center.

Dish currently only offers Project Genesis on a specially kitted-out, small Samsung Galaxy S22, which it's essentially selling for half price. Dish told me that it chose the S22 because it's a popular, high-end device. It's also the first phone that supports 3.45GHz airwaves(Opens in a new window), of which Dish owns a bunch although it hasn't started broadcasting on them yet.

When you get the Dish S22, the first thing that starts up