If EchoStar’s (most) recent brush with death provides any lesson, it’s too not play poker with its chairman Charlie Ergen. But with that victory in hand, can Ergen and EchoStar use that financial momentum to become a true telecommunications player?

As a quick recap, the telecommunications and financial Svengali pushed all of his chips to the center of the table in creating a refinancing plan that if approved will see EchoStar shed a significant amount of debt, some of its money losing operations, and bet its future on the wireless and satellite communications space.

EchoStar also worked out other refinancing deals with TPG that will see it ditch $7 billion in debt and provide EchoStar with $5.5 billion in new financing that CEO Hamid Akhavan said it would “invest in our mobile business and continue to build and enhance our nationwide 5G open RAN network.” Those deals removed an immediate financial time bomb that has been sitting front and center at EchoStar.

It should be said that EchoStar’s financial hurdle was crafted by Ergen’s past wheeling-and-dealing, which saw his various operating entities spend billions on wireless spectrum licenses – many with questionable deployment models – and then sign up for a network deployment plan that Ergen acknowledged would cost up to $10 billion. These decisions led Ergen to make some questionable financing decisions that basically resulted in him having to be pot-committed and pushing money into the center of the table.

It also needs to be said that all of this financial back-and-forth will require current EchoStar bondholders to take a significant “haircut” on their current investment, and if the current financial plan does pass, Ergen is set to pocket a cool $1.5 billion.

Can EchoStar soar? Does this mean EchoStar is now in the clear? Far from it. If anything, these moves put more pressure on EchoStar and Ergen to become competitors in the market and not just a financial sideshow.

EchoStar’s current financial drivers are its Hughes Network Systems satellite broadband service and its consumer-focused Boost Mobile offerings. But to call them “drivers” would be generous as Hughes posted a sharp decline in earnings through the first half of this year and Boost Mobile continued to dig a deeper financial hole.

The domestic wireless telecommunication market is as competitive as any in the world. Over the past 20 years, the market has consolidated to three nationwide operators (Verizon, AT&T, and T-Mobile US) and a handful of small regional players.

That consolidation has allowed the big three to control most of what happens in the space. Their main brands are duking it out in the high-end of the market; they each have various no-contract, prepaid offerings that tackle the low- and mid-price points; and they have various ties to adjacent entities in the space like cable telecom providers to ensure those options don’t become too enticing.

Those established operators are posting record-low customer churn levels, which means EchoStar will be hard-pressed to steal customers with a fiscally responsible model from these established entrants.

Dave Novosel, who is a financial analyst with corporate bond analyst firm GimmeCredit, in a report tied to the refinancing move stated EchoStar “will be facing the same concerns Dish is now encountering – the expansion of cable, fiber, and fixed wireless that is overwhelming the satellite companies, leading to the loss of subscribers.”

Instead, EchoStar will need to find unique opportunities.

Ergen has repeatedly touted EchoStar’s ability to tap its unique network architecture to go after lucrative market segments outside of the mainstream consumer focus of its larger rivals. This was based on the ability to combine Dish Network’s expanding 5G network and 5G standalone (SA) core with the satellite and enterprise/government capabilities of EchoStar and Hughes.

“By integrating Dish spectrum with EchoStar’s technological capabilities, we will have the ability to amplify 5G private networks,” Ergen said as part of a conference call announcing the tighter operating combination of those two entities, which itself was expected to shore up its finances. “In other words, what we’re able to do is combine satellite communication and terrestrial communications all within the 5G cloud-native platform.”

However, EchoStar to date has been unable to unlock those benefits.

Akhavan noted during the carrier’s most recent earnings call that the private 5G space remains “nascent,” though it continues to “have enormous hope and expectation for that market. Nothing in the immediate future, though … as you know, in enterprise sales, and particularly in a brand-new category, where … there is no … strong precedents in the market, there’s a bunch of business and development activities that have to go on before significant sales can be made.”

I definitely have questions as to whether EchoStar will remain an ongoing entity in its trimmer form, but I am done questioning Ergen’s ability to extend that operating window and continue building his pile of chips.