Dish Network hit a significant coverage milestone for its uniquely structured 5G network that guarantees continued control over critical spectrum licenses and keeps the carrier as a potential player in the burgeoning private 5G space.

The carrier reported that its 5G network now covered more than 70% of the U.S. population, or more than 240 million people. Dish was required to hit that coverage mark by June 14 in order to meet government requirements for some of its spectrum licenses.

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) requires license owners to meet specific coverage build-out requirements based on a certain percentage of the U.S. population that those licenses cover. These rules vary based on different spectrum bands but are in place to ensure that a license owner is putting those licenses to work for the common good and not just sitting on those licenses to sell at a later date.

Dish Network’s newly bolstered coverage is on the back of more than 15,000 deployed antennas using open radio access network (RAN) technology and an underlying cloud-native architecture. That equipment is provided by more than 30 vendors, including Amazon Web Services (AWS), Nokia, Dell, Cisco, VMware, Samsung and Mavenir.

Dish Network also boasted that it now offers voice over new radio (VoNR) service to more than 70 million people. The VoNR technology supports voice traffic over a 5G network instead of some current deployments that continue to run voice traffic over a legacy 4G LTE connection.

Dish Network’s 5G network supports the carrier’s legacy Boost Mobile and Boost Infinite customers as well as its 5G-specific Project Genesis offering. The carrier also has roaming agreements with AT&T and T-Mobile US.

T-Mobile US CFO Peter Osvaldik told an investor conference this week that he expects Dish Network to be a “competitor in the postpaid space.”

Dish Network’s latest coverage milestone comes a year after the carrier officially launched its network. That much-delayed launch initially covered just 20% of the U.S. population, which also just hit a government mandate.

Dish Network Chairman Charlie Ergen had tied the delay to equipment integration challenges.

“We’re six months behind where we thought we’d be, and it’s my fault. We just didn’t maybe anticipate that we would have to do as much on the technical side,” Ergen said on the company’s fourth-quarter of 2021 earnings call. “Ultimately we found that we had to become the system integrator. It wasn’t a role that we thought we were going to take on. But with all the vendors, somebody’s got to be the middleman between them and be the glue that holds them together. We probably squandered some time, but that’s my fault.”

The carrier is also now looking for ways to cut spending to turnaround its shaky financial stance.

The carrier to this point has been spending billions of dollars to build out its cloud-native 5G network to meet coverage deadlines 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, and late last year it was forced to dip into the finance markets at a time when interest rates spiked.

Ergen more recently noted that the carrier would begin to cut spending once it hit the 70% coverage requirement. That spending lull will be a self-admitted important time for Dish Network to prove it can be a competitive wireless carrier in the market.

“We have a narrow window of opportunity here … to perform and execute and address our capital structure,” Ergen said during Dish Network’s most recent earnings call. “We have to do a lot of things right. We have a small margin of error but it’s all doable.”

That opportunity includes market penetration into the lucrative enterprise vertical as a private 5G network player. Ergen admitted during the earnings call that it has not “made substantial progress in terms of the enterprise business in terms of announcements, but behind the scenes” the company has outlined a trio of ways to enter the market.

The outspoken executive said the first way would be to build out the required network infrastructure itself and then lease capacity on that network to interested enterprises or vendor partners. He added that “would take capex that obviously is a bit less attractive to us.”

The second “is people just pay for it from the get go, so it’s cash positive from day one,” Ergen quickly said before laying out the third option.

“The third is that some of our partners in our build, whether it be, you know, Cisco or Dell or AWS come to mind where they already have a big enterprise business, that they just add our spectrum into their thinking about how they would design private networks, and at that point we’d be we would be more of a wholesale provider of spectrum,” Ergen said.

That third option echoes what Ergen said last year as a way for Dish Network to target the enterprise space. At that time, Ergen said those vendors “want to move beyond Wi-Fi into more licensed spectrum and more secure spectrum and more control over their spectrum.”

This plays into the notion that licensed spectrum can provide more secure and stable private networks compared to using either unlicensed spectrum with a Wi-Fi architecture or using the quasi-licensed Citizen Broadband Radio Spectrum (CBRS) band that is managed by different licensing tiers.

“Any of those three things are possibilities on how you would go ahead and build an enterprise business,” Ergen said this week of Dish Network’s potential private network options. “It’s going to be a huge market for all the players. I just think we’re a little bit better positioned because I think the kind of network we have is the kind of network that companies when they really become omniscient about what a private network can do for you and what it should do for you, the architecture of what we have is just … without the legacy … is just better if you’re gonna build it new that you should build it right.”

Ergen had previously stated that the private network business could be worth anywhere from $30 billion to $100 billion, and that “it’s unquestionable that there’s really only four companies that can participate in a large degree in the private network business that has” access to licensed spectrum.