Dish Ahead of Schedule on 600 MHz Buildout: Ergen
Dish Network's tower-building pace for its national wireless 5G network -- roughly 1,000 a month -- is putting it within "spitting distance" of meeting its next 600 MHz buildout milestone, well ahead of the 2025 deadline, CEO Charlie Ergen said Wednesday in a call with analysts as Dish released Q3 results. He said the $2 billion the company announced it was raising for its 5G network will cover the costs of meeting its milestone of reaching 70% of the U.S. population.
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Dish has more than 10,000 towers built now, as its 5G network reaches more than 35% of the U.S. population, Ergen said. Network costs to cover the remaining 30% of the population could be as much as they were for the first 70%,"maybe more," he said. Many of the incumbent wireless carriers aren't profitable, and Dish is able to forego building its own unprofitable towers by instead roaming on their 5G networks, Ergen said: "Why would you build 80,000 towers if you didn't have to?" he said.
T-Mobile -- now with a higher market cap than AT&T or Verizon -- “is running away with the market,” Ergen said. He said a route for competing is sharing resources, spectrum and capital expenses.
The company's Boost Infinite postpaid wireless service is poised for wide launch in Q1, Ergen said. It will employ AT&T's mobile virtual network operator as well as Dish's Band 70 spectrum, the same as its prepaid Boost Mobile service, Ergen said.
The political environment around elections makes a Dish/DirecTV combination less likely, as companies are hesitant "to be a political football for somebody to complain about big companies," Ergen said. He said after the midterm elections, there's a window of about 15 months where pursuing such a deal might make sense. He said a Dish/DirecTV combination would bring significant synergies, though "not what they were five years ago, two years ago." He said legal objections to such a deal diminished over time due to competition from over-the-top services and proliferation of broadband.
Dish and the CONX special purpose acquisition company have discussed CONX buying a portion of Dish's retail wireless business, but Dish's board looked at other options as well, said Ergen. Ergen is part owner of CONX.
Dish ended Q3 with 7.6 million direct broadcast satellite subscribers and 2.4 million Sling subscribers, compared with 8.4 million and 2.6 million in Q3 2021, respectively. It had 8 million retail wireless subs, down 800,000 year over year. It had revenue of $4.1 billion, down 7.9% from the same quarter a year prior.
Network Security
Jim Adkins, director of Dish’s Defense Operations Center, described how the company is deploying a 5G security operations center (SOC) to keep its network safe as it deploys 5G, in a Mobile World Live webinar Wednesday. “By going to the cloud and really using containerized applications we’re really driving the cutting edge,” he said. “One of the big challenges we have had is really understanding the concept of building a network of networks,” he said.
With 5G, and network slicing, “it’s no longer a flat paradigm of networks where everyone connects to one place, we have a single-wall perimeter that we can secure and monitor,” Adkins said. “We’re having to monitor each zone as its own level of trust,” he said. The cloud provides tools for making the network more secure, but those tools “have to be configured correctly and monitored for that correct configuration,” he said. “Our operations center, honestly, has been overwhelmed by the level of complexity increase that we’ve taken since starting our 5G journey,” he said. Dish found it has to rely more on automation and machine learning to keep up, he said.
“Visibility is, honestly, the first and foremost rule” in a network of networks, Adkins said: “You cannot secure what you cannot see. … We’re deploying infrastructure at such a pace … there is always a risk that something in our automated pipelines failed, and we don’t see new assets coming online.” Noise is also a concern, he said. As the network grows, the SOC is logging “millions and millions” of alerts every hour, he said. “We’ve exceeded the potential of existing or legacy” networks to handle the alerts, he said. “The 5G threat landscape produces way too much data for us to simply use a static rule model,” he said.
5G networks are “fundamentally different than other networks that we have worked on,” said Keith O'Brien, chief technology officer-service providers at Palo Alto Networks, which is working with Dish on its SOC. “They’re carrying different types of traffic,” starting with the IoT and eventually more vehicle-to-vehicle communications, he said. “There’s going to be different things we’re going to have to monitor,” he said.
Dish’s network is being deployed using public cloud, O’Brien said. “Technology that companies like Netflix pushed forward as far as a scalability of applications, we’re now using in mobile networks,” he said: “Those are the kinds of things we have to start considering” as we build a SOC. “We have to really take into account all the things that are supporting that mobile infrastructure,” he said.