Dish Network is building a first-of-its-kind 5G network in the U.S. and benefits of that are abundant, according to Stephen Bye, EVP and chief commercial officer at the greenfield operator.

Once deployed, Dish will be able to serve enterprises, consumers, and wholesale customers unlike any of its competitors, he said at an investor event this week. Because Dish is strictly adhering to open radio access network (RAN) principles, cloud-native infrastructure, and widespread virtualization of network functions, it can pull levers that most operators cannot effectively do today, Bye explained. 

“Most networks have been built to serve the retail market, and then sort of modified to support wholesale” and enterprise customers by repackaging the consumer product, he said. “When we build the architecture we’re not prioritizing one over the other, we’re building a platform that allows us to serve each of those segments concurrently, and that’s really important.”

Dish’s network “is designed with a fabric that supports network slicing from the radio all the way up through the application to the [operations and business support systems],” Bye said. That native support for network slicing will allow Dish to create an environment for enterprises to “own and operate a network as if it was their own private slice.” 

The operator will be able to support wholesale and consumer wireless networks in the same manner, he explained. “There isn’t really a part of the market that we don’t see our business supporting and serving.”

Dish is also taking a more broad and less restrictive view of the enterprise opportunity, according to Bye. “There was a lot of focus on IoT and what that can do to an industry. And I think, candidly, the demand for that has been suppressed because the economics haven’t really played out the way they could otherwise,” he said.

“The promise of the architecture that we’ll be deploying is to unlock a lot of that opportunity that was very difficult to capture and very difficult to realize,” Bye said. The challenges that have beset IoT are as much a functional limitation as it is the economics involved, he explained, pointing to the higher cost of including a 4G LTE or 5G module into a device versus WiFi. “That becomes an impediment to the adoption curve,” he said.

Bye, a wireless industry veteran, has encountered numerous challenges with legacy or ill-advised technology choices throughout his career, most notably the work he did at Sprint to unravel its bet on WiMAX, migrate away from iDEN to refocus operations around CDMA and later 4G LTE. The excitement he conveys about the opportunity to build something from scratch on new, largely unused technology at a greenfield operator is palpable. 

That position allows Dish to reset the playbook, he said. “We’re not dealing with a lot of that incumbency, and some of these antiquated systems that exist in a traditional network. It’s so hard. I mean, I’ve been there. It’s so hard to replace those systems and you’re stuck with them for decades longer than you would like to be.”

Since he joined Dish a year ago, Bye and his colleagues have been busy defining and locking down buildout plans, validating the technology, and making vendor selections. “What’s really important for us is adhering to sort of this [open RAN] architecture, and then really an open philosophy” is shared among every vendor Dish strikes deals with, he said. 

“A lot of the heavy lifting has been done, and we’re moving into that execution phase,” Bye said.

Dish continues to face skeptics who question its ability to meet network buildout requirements imposed by the Federal Communications Commission, the viability of a nationwide 5G open RAN, and how it’s going to pay for everything required to meet its goals. Charlie Ergen, chairman and co-founder of the aspiring greenfield operator, has largely dismissed the technical challenges but rather consistently admits that Dish’s biggest risk is an ability to execute.

As such, Bye and his team are heads down in the weeds of network planning and much of that work is done, he said. “When we go into the field, it’s really testing our processes for deployment. … We’ve tested a lot of the technology, we know the path that we’re on, it’s how do you put all of this together and test the actual deployment process itself.”

Dish’s executive team recently sidestepped a previously stated goal to deploy 5G service in a trial market before the end of this year, and now claim the operator will be activating service in some smaller markets in the first half of 2021. Dish’s first major market deployment is currently planned for the third quarter of 2021, and Ergen recently said the company is waiting for open RAN radios from Fujitsu to make that happen. 

“It’s one of those things where you’re building a pipeline for the deployment, you’re building sort of the capacity on the front end and then what will happen is we’re obviously going to run well ahead of that and then bring on those markets when they’re ready,” Bye explained. 

“We're very comfortable with the path that we're on,” he said. “We’re not trying to break speed limits or disrupt the laws of physics in that process.”