Dish Network’s executive team faced what has become a quarterly barrage of skepticism and pointed questions about its 5G strategy during its third-quarter 2020 earnings call. 

Charlie Ergen, chairman and co-founder of the aspiring greenfield operator, set the tone early when he rescinded his previously stated goal of activating 5G service in a single U.S. market before the end of the year. “We’ll have some preliminary small markets in the first quarter (of 2021), but it’ll be the third quarter before we have a major market up and running that the world can touch and feel a little bit to see what we’re doing,” he said. 

The company is working fast as it continues to hire, ink agreements with vendors and partners, and plan its 5G network buildout, but those efforts aren’t always visible to investors or industry observers, Ergen explained. 

“There’s so much detail and so many things that go into it. We’ve strategically said we’re focused on just getting the job done. There’s not great forums for us to communicate in a world of COVID-19, because for us to show you what we’re doing you’ve really got to see it,” he said. 

“A really good network starts with planning. And while we wish we had a supply of radios today, because we are ready to deploy in certain markets, we’re dependent on those open RAN radios from Fujitsu and those don’t arrive en masse until the second half of next year,” Ergen said. 

Those Fujitsu radios will support all of the spectrum bands Dish currently has access to and bands it anticipates gaining access to in the future, according to Dish. Technical hurdles on open RAN radios, an issue Ergen previously measured as “the biggest risk to our whole program,” have been overcome, he said. 

Ergen, as he reflexively does on these calls, provided analysts and investors with almost equal doses of bravado and humility, noting that Dish is “13 years in to a 15-year project in wireless.”

He also reiterated that Dish’s 5G network buildout is an execution challenge, not a technical challenge. “The time to build a network is not to climb a tower, which is what everybody’s thinking about,” Ergen explained, adding that the bulk of the work required for an open radio access network (RAN), which Dish intends to build, involves the planning, permitting, zoning, and operational structure. 

Tower climbing can be done in seven days because Dish is adhering to cloud-native network provisioning and a strict separation of hardware and software, he claimed, adding that contracts and proposals with tower companies are sitting on his desk, but he’s still negotiating on the terms of those agreements. 

“We think that open RAN is a better architecture,” Ergen said. “We think that’s where the world will be three years from now. Are we wrong? Maybe. So, should you put a $5,000 cell site router box at a tower or should you do it in software for $100? We think software’s a better way, but we could be wrong.”

Per its complicated deal with T-Mobile US, Sprint, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), and the Department of Justice (DoJ), Dish is required to cover 20% of the U.S. population with 5G service by June 2022, and 50% of the population by June 2023, with at least 15,000 cell sites. Executives consistently maintain that Dish can achieve those requirements with a total capex investment of $10 billion, but many analysts remain skeptical. 

The company’s seven-year agreement with T-Mobile US that allows it to operate Boost Mobile as a mobile virtual network operator (MVNO) has helped pad that funding requirement by extending the timeline by which it will have to gain access to those funds, Ergen said during the call. Dish acquired Boost Mobile, formerly Sprint’s prepaid business, in July for $1.4 billion. 

“Initially we thought that $10 billion might be spent over three years,” but because of the MVNO deal with T-Mobile “now we don’t want to wait until we build the whole network to monetize it,” Ergen said. “We get to build out market by market and monetize, so the net effect of that is that $10 billion is stretched over seven years instead of being stretched over three years.”

Dish said it invested almost $50 million in opex and capex on its 5G business during the quarter. It expects that level of investment to remain steady in Q4 and increase substantially in the second half of 2021 as it ramps up its 5G deployment.

“We’re not going to convince anybody on this call. We didn’t convince anybody on the last call. We’re not going to convince anybody on the next call, but when the people who really do their homework come see it and visit us and visit our vendors, then I’ll think you’ll start to see the tide turn a little bit and there’ll be a few less skeptics,” Ergen said. “We could fail. … But again, we don’t spend our time and effort and capital for things we think are going to fail.”

Dish is “building Netflix in a Blockbuster world. … It’s not that Blockbuster didn’t work. It did, it just seems pretty archaic,” Ergen said. “You’re talking to a guy who knows because we owned it and lost a hundred million bucks on it, so I’ll never do it again.”