Dish Network today held firm to its previously delayed goal of activating 5G service in a single U.S. market by October. In doing so, however, the aspiring greenfield operator significantly lowered expectations for what that service will deliver in its early days. 

“By the end of the third quarter you’ll be able to take a phone and see whether we work or not, and see all the problems, and we’ll have them for sure, and then see if we can fix them,” Charlie Ergen, chairman and co-founder of Dish, said during the company’s fourth-quarter 2020 earnings call. 

“Then you’ll have a feel for how good we are at execution, and how good our architecture is, and how good our network is going to be,” he said. “But realize we’re not going to be running in the first city. We’ll be crawling and then hopefully we’ll get up and be walking by the end of the year.”

The company declined to say how many markets its 5G network will reach by 2021, but maintains that it will meet or exceed coverage, speed, and radio site count requirements imposed by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC). Dish also appears to be pulling back from comments it made in December that its 5G network would be available in preliminary small markets by April, and would only say that its first major market will be home to an NFL team.

“It’s going to be a beta test for lack of a better word,” Ergen said. “I just don’t know what kind of problems we’re going to have. I just know we’re going to have problems and certain things aren’t going to work.”

The “big test bed,” as he described it, will “work kinda day one,” but “as you work those bugs and kinks out in a major market, it’s cookie cutter after that."

Despite growing investment and a consistent push from Dish to ink contracts with dozens of vendors for its cloud-native, open radio access network (RAN), the diminished expectations set by the company today seemingly contradict CEO Erik Carlson’s claim that 2021 will be a “landmark year” for the company in the wireless market.

Ergen readily admits that Dish faces many challenges, but he continues to claim Dish’s biggest risk is one of execution. The delayed 5G deployments are not winning over any skeptics in the meantime. The company as recently as last summer maintained it would have 5G service in a single market before the end of 2020, and now claims it won’t have the necessary supply of radios from its vendors until this summer.

The disparity between promises made and promises fulfilled remains wide, and the company’s ability to explain or make excuses for the delays in good faith is waning.

Ergen also, during the call, lowered expectations for the speeds Dish’s 5G network will provide, at least out of the gate. The initial focus will be on consistency, identifying problems in the network, and developing or tuning tools that can self correct those problems as deployment increases, he said.

Industry observers “will have a pretty good idea where Dish stands by the end of the year,” Ergen added.

Marc Rouanne, EVP and chief network officer at Dish, said the company is moving into the second phase of its open RAN journey. “We’re starting to build. We have tested a lot of vendors, we have brought radios, compute, and software together” and now “we are transferring this knowledge to our teams in the field in order to build it across the U.S.”

Dish has established contracts with many vendors for fiber, radios, transport, towers, operations and business support, compute processors, network hardware, network automation, software for services, a 5G standalone core, and cloud-native telco workloads. But the yet-to-be-realized supply of radios from Fujitsu remains the biggest gating factor for 5G deployment activities, according to Ergen.

“We’ve already had some delays in that and we’re pretty confident but until the factory production is spitting it out and we get to see it with our own eyes, we’ll see, but the cadence looks pretty good,” he said.

Dish has also named VMware as its preferred partner for certifying and verifying its mix of vendors for cloud-native functions, but it has yet to name a public cloud provider or multiple cloud providers as part of that effort.

The company declined to provide guidance on how much it plans to spend on 5G-related capex in 2021, but said it spent $50 million on 5G opex and capex in Q4. That matches the level of spending Dish reported on 5G during Q3 2020, and the company repeated that it expects capex on 5G to increase substantially throughout 2021.

Meanwhile, Dish lost almost three times as many wireless subscribers from its Boost business than the number of customers that fled its satellite-TV business during the quarter. The company banked $733 million in net income on $4.56 billion in revenue during the quarter.