Dish Network isn’t the first greenfield network operator to embrace open radio access network (RAN) and cloud-native principles, but if it succeeds it could be one of the most pervasive 5G networks of its kind.

“For the first time, the telco industry has standardized itself around the cloud principle and that’s what 5G standalone is, and because we don’t have a legacy network we can embrace it,” Marc Rouanne, EVP and chief network officer at Dish, said at the virtual VMworld conference.

During the last nine months, Dish has tested and selected multiple vendors for its network aspirations, including VMware for its telco cloud, Nokia for 5G standalone core software, Altiostar and Mavenir for open RAN software, Fujitsu for radios, and Ciena’s Blue Planet offering for network automation. The company is emulating Rakuten Mobile’s network infrastructure strategy, but at a much greater scale. 

“A lot of people think open RAN is challenged when it comes to performance, but because you have access to all the data and because you have access to much more computing power, all of a sudden you can push the limits of spectrum and capacity much further,” Rouanne said, adding that it can also onboard software at the radio and cloud-native level in hours or days. 

The satellite TV provider doesn’t have a commercial network of its own beyond the mobile virtual network operator agreement it acquired earlier this year, but it intends to achieve that goal following a cumulative $26 billion investment in wireless-related assets and estimates it will spend another $10 billion to actually build a nationwide mobile network. 

“When you have cloud-native capabilities, it’s very easy to change some microservices or some capabilities without impacting the whole chain,” Rouanne explained, describing VMware as Dish’s preferred partner for certifying and verifying its mix of vendors for cloud-native functions.

VMware recently repackaged various technologies for mobile network operators as the 5G Telco Cloud Platform. This included updated versions and more integrated support for VMware’s cloud-native software stack and network automation services.

“VMware is providing us a very large set of software capabilities — all the way from the low-level capabilities to hypervisor, networking, and storage capabilities — but all the way to the automation and Kubernetes orchestration and the network function orchestration, so it’s a full stack that we are going to consume based on our requirements,” Rouanne said. 

“When you design a completely dynamic network, you don’t decide where things are going to be upfront. You let the network design itself. So we have access to all these stacks and capabilities on VMware, and the orchestrator will push them where needed, dynamically,” he said. 

Rouanne said Dish will more forcefully explain its architecture roadmap in the coming months, but he teased some other primary areas of focus and strategy during his chat at VMworld.

With an orchestrator sitting at the core of the network, Dish intends to build “one of the first large scale distributed data lakes” because it will require extensive cloud computing for high-level data consumption, analytics, and local compute to extract information at the edge of the network in cellular and aggregation sites, he explained. 

That distributed data cloud will include edge and central components from a mix of vendors, according to Rouanne. “There is diversity because there are different needs, so there will be different form factors, compute chipsets at the edge, and that’s why our data is going to reside in a distributed data lake with different partners,” he explained.

5G is unique and, as such, requires completely different skill sets and network architecture, Rouanne said. “You need to understand wireless, the things that are good background, but 5G is a more cloud-driven and software-driven business than radio driven, and that’s something that is not well understood in the marketplace,” he said. 

“People talk a lot about radio,” Rouanne added. “4G and 5G radios, the things you put on top of the masts, most vendors they are the same, but as soon as you go down the mast, now you hit the cloud and that’s where it’s completely different and it looks like mini data centers, mini private networks, or big data centers if you go all the way up.”