Charlie Ergen’s Dish Network/EchoStar empire is slashing more jobs and could be considering selling off some of its substantial spectrum assets in the latest moves by the struggling telecommunications operator to solidify its financial footing.

Dish Network, which was recently shuffled under the wing of sister-company EchoStar, filed a notice that it was cutting 157 positions in its home state of Colorado. That move comes just two months after Dish filed plans to cut 499 jobs in the state.

The cuts represent about 5% of Dish Network’s approximately 14,000 employee count. It also highlights the carrier’s ongoing fiscal rationalization efforts that led to the EchoStar merger and news this week that the combined entity might look to sell some of its wide-ranging spectrum holdings.

The spectrum shell game will see Dish Network transfer a bushel of its licenses to a newly formed EchoStar Wireless Holdings entity, which is a wholly owned subsidiary of EchoStar. The license transfer will include spectrum ranging from 1.9 GHz up to 47 GHz. Dish Network will retain direct control over most of the spectrum it’s using to power its 5G network.

The company has been spending billions of dollars to build out its cloud-native 5G network to meet coverage deadlines from the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) tied to the $34 billion it has spent on wireless spectrum licenses. Ergen had previously noted that the carrier’s full build could run up to $10 billion.

EchoStar has also shuffled around ownership of Dish Network’s approximately 3 million satellite-TV subscribers that will allow one of its entities to loan profits from that business to other entities within the organization. Ergen had previously hinted that it could use its revenue-generating services to help fund the financially draining Dish Network 5G operations.

EchoStar has also engaged financial and legal advisors “to assist the company in evaluating potential strategic alternatives.”

“This asset allocation enables EchoStar to more optimally position the necessary resources for the execution of its strategic goal of becoming the premier provider of terrestrial mobile, satellite connectivity and content services” EchoStar President and CEO Hamid Akhavan noted in a statement. Akhavan also recently took on the CEO role for Dish Network following the departure of former CEO Erik Carlson late last year.

Some analysts predict the spectrum shuffle could result in the sale of those excess spectrum holdings, which in turn could help fund ongoing operations.

"We believe the more likely outcome under the category of considering strategic alternatives could be spectrum monetization," Citi noted in a Seeking Alpha report. "Net-net, better access to capital for EchoStar can improve the prospects for the company to address its upcoming funding needs for its ongoing 5G network build, retail wireless marketing and upcoming debt maturities.”

That financial stability will be important as Dish Network is facing several debt repayment deadlines beginning in early 2024. Corporate bond research firm Gimmie Credit noted those maturities total $3 billion, with that firm’s Dave Novosel adding, “management did not really propose a plan. We find it difficult to believe that Dish will survive without a partner.”

Dish Network also recently agreed to pay a nonrefundable $100 million payment to T-Mobile US to postpone an option to spend $3.5 billion for valuable low-band spectrum, further highlighting Dish Network’s precarious fiscal footing.

“We have a narrow path, but there is a path for us to achieve financial stability and make sure we meet our commitments,” Ergen said during Dish Network’s most recent earnings call. “Having been through this for a long time, we’ve had narrow paths before and it’s a sharp focus for our management and necessity sometimes is the mother invention.”

Ergen did add that if that path continues to narrow, Dish Network could be a valuable target.

“A retail wireless company that has seven-and-a-half-million subscribers and now has an online presence is probably a valuable company,” Ergen said. “We could argue whether we managed it as well as we should, but the fact is that that’s a very valuable property. So obviously there could be ways from an investment point of view, there may be people that are interested in that sort of thing.”

Dish Network’s latest financial juggling was announced the same day it was awarded a $50 million grant from the U.S. Department of Commerce's National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) to create an Open RAN Center for Integration & Deployment (ORCID). The facility will allow third parties to test and validate radio unit (RU), distributed unit (DU) and central unit (CU) hardware and software platforms against Dish Network’s open radio access network (RAN).

The facility will be housed at a Dish Network location in Cheyenne, Wyoming. Partners already signed up to participate include Fujitsu, Mavenir, VMware by Broadcom, Analog Devices, Arm, Cisco, Dell Technologies, Intel, JMA Wireless, Nvidia, Qualcomm and Samsung.

Those participants will be able to test individual and multiple network elements targeted at open RAN interoperability, performance and security. These are increasingly important issues facing the open RAN market.

David Zufall, VP wireless infrastructure development at Dish Network, recently explained during an event at testing provider CableLabs that the carrier initially struggled with piecing together the disparate parts of a network that open RAN provides.

“Management of the overall structure was an area that we struggled with,” Zufall said. “How can we make sure that the entire software distribution system is clean, that we’ve got the ability to manage all the individual vendors.”

Zufall said that the ecosystem can help address this issue with more focus on setting minimum standards that vendors need to adhere to before their equipment is installed into a network. The O-RAN Alliance has been a focal point of these efforts, but real-world deployments have shown that operators might need to take more control on these efforts in the near term.

“I think that’s going to be up to [operators] to force it among our vendors,” Zufall said. “We can define the basic layers, that it’s going to be a cloud-native environment and we have our principles, so I think we can define the environment. But I think we have to take the bold step and say ‘I am going to have a multivendor network and I am going to have a multi-cloud network and I’m not just going to use somebody’s middleware to enable the interoperability that happens to work on both of them. We were willing to do it on the RAN and we saved some money. We’re willing to do it on hardware, but we have to go to the next step, and I think that’s on the operator community to kind of force it across our vendors.”