Dish Network is on track and has all the pieces in place, including radios, to deploy its 5G open radio access network (RAN) in one major U.S. city by October, according to Marc Rouanne, the greenfield operator’s EVP and chief network officer.

That timeline is unchanged from what Dish shared during its most recent earnings call in February, but it does reflect a nine-month delay from its previous goal. Dish chairman and co-founder Charlie Ergen, less than two months ago, primarily blamed the delay on an unfulfilled supply of radios from Fujitsu and MTI, and said the radios wouldn’t be on hand until this summer.

That’s no longer the case, Rouanne told SDxCentral in a phone interview. “We have the equipment that has been ordered now. We are close enough to see what we can consume,” he said. 

“We have everything we need. We have tested many, many vendors” and Dish has announced contracts with about 35 vendors, beginning with radios, followed by towers, backhaul, network core software, and most recently security, Rouanne said. 

The operator still has a few vendor contracts in the pipeline, but it has revealed almost everything it needs to build a network, he explained, adding that other software will be continually added to meet specialized requirements for enterprises.

“We’re building a large cloud-native network with many opportunities for enterprises networks, so we will add a lot of additional features and functionalities that you may not consider as part of a 5G network around analytics, or around data management, around other things that go beyond the traditional way people define telco,” Rouanne explained.

Dish Network is assembling a network that will allow customers to run specialized software via APIs to extend services, depending on specific requirements, he added. 

Meanwhile, all of the necessary software and hardware for Dish’s 5G network has gone through multiple cycles of testing, starting with basic tests, followed by more comprehensive testing for scalability and interoperability, according to Rouanne. 

The software is “mature” and all of the network functions tested by Dish to date have been “clean,” he said, adding that the company has put more resources into cloud-native technology and automation. “That’s where we have to put more effort because we are a pioneer there, but we’ve been happy with the maturity of what we’ve been using.”

More broadly, and because of the performance of vendor software and hardware it has brought together thus far, Dish hasn’t encountered a need to do more internal development than it anticipated when it started its open RAN journey. 

“We have a much smaller research and development and technology team than traditional operators, and we move much faster,” Rouanne said. “I know this because I’ve been in this market for 30 years now, so I know what it takes in other places.”

Dish’s speed is derived from cloud-native principles like continuous integration and deployment (CI/CD), testing, and scalability, he said. “The other thing is that we’re a greenfield, so we’re not carrying all the complexity. When you bring new features and capabilities in an existing network, you have to do a lot of regression in order to check what you’re doing will work with the old hardware.”

Some of Dish’s U.S. competitors are using hardware that’s 15 years old, and all types of variants that have been introduced since then, and that requires an enormous amount of combined software and hardware testing, according to Rouanne. “We don’t have that. We’re starting clean. We’re starting with software that is all aligned on the same spec and recommendations for validation.”

He claims Dish hasn’t experienced the complex testing and integration challenges that are often debated around open RAN and cloud-native network infrastructure. “We’ve been lucky or we knew that open RAN has been extensively tested on the FlexRAN architecture from Intel for the last five year,” he said. “I guess it took time to get there, but when we started, the drivers, the stacks were already there and had been tested, including by some other operators.”

Moreover, Rouanne said the radios Dish is using are effectively the same as any other radio in a commercial deployment. “Different vendors, but the people we’re using have done radios for the global market, and we have not found any difference there,” he said.

A strict adherence to open RAN and cloud-native principles has helped Dish avoid unnecessary complexities, and it hasn’t encountered any challenges that surprised or otherwise caught the company’s engineers off guard, Rouanne said. 

“Maybe we’ve not seen all the challenges that are in front of us. Time will tell,” he said. “It’s work, but I’ve seen much bigger challenges in the past when supporting deployments. This one is moving normally.”