Dish Network is running out of runway as it continues delaying deployment of its 5G open radio access network (RAN). The aspiring greenfield operator today pushed back, once again, on its plan to activate service in a single U.S. city.

Now it insists 5G service will be live in Las Vegas in the fourth quarter under a beta testing program that will run for at least 90 days. That effectively pushes commercial 5G availability to early 2022.

Dish executives were confident, exactly a year ago, that one 5G market would be live before the end of 2020. Company brass stopped making those claims by November 2020, but soon after said small markets would be live in the first quarter of 2021 with a major market running before October 2021. 

The company is required to cover at least 20% of the U.S. population with its network by June 2022, and Dave Mayo, Dish’s EVP of network development, said the company is still on track to meet that Federal Communications Commission mandate. 

Mayo described Dish’s network buildout plan as a decentralized effort spanning four regions and 36 markets, and claimed most of the tower site leases required to meet the first of a series of mandates are signed. “We’ve commenced construction on close to 30 geographies within those 36 markets,” he said on Dish’s second-quarter 2021 earnings call.

Mayo added that most of the construction activities in Las Vegas, its first major market, will be complete in the next 60 days.

Charlie Ergen, chair and co-founder of Dish, warned that integration work will continue through the beta period, but added that other cities will be activated soon after Las Vegas as well.

“Things work in the lab today,” he said. “My experience is things don’t work exactly right the first month or two and you’ve got to integrate that.”

Once Dish’s network is active in Las Vegas, the majority of customer traffic in that market will ride on its network, but it will also be complemented by roaming access on AT&T, explained Stephen Bye, EVP and chief commercial officer.

Dish last month signed a 10-year, $5 billion network services agreement with AT&T to allow its customers to roam on AT&T’s 4G LTE and 5G networks while Dish continues building out coverage. The deal came together after relations soured between Dish and T-Mobile US, which plans to shut down the former Sprint 3G CDMA network on January 1, 2022, and then shut down the Sprint LTE network by the end of June 2022. 

Despite those interim measures, Dish executives remain confident that its 5G network will be nearly nationwide in 2023.

“We’re less than two years from critical mass. We’re going to cover 70% of the country in the next two years,” Ergen said. “That’s enough critical mass. That’s on par with where Sprint was … and we’re going to have a better network than they had, and we’re going to have a differentiated network, and better roaming than Sprint had. This isn’t a five-year project.”

Ergen continued to hedge, as he is wont to do, throughout the earnings call — disguising and offsetting moments of boast with humility. Dish expects its 5G network to be a “full fledged product early next year,” but that will be determined by the results of its 90-day beta, he said. 

“We get a first impression and we want it to be a good first impression,” Ergen said. “The bottom line is that it’s going to be a minimum of 90 days and if we do our jobs correctly and our vendors do their jobs correctly then we’re going to be ready for primetime at the first of the year.” 

Dish’s level of execution and success in these first markets will also weigh heavily on its ability to earn business with enterprises, a segment the company has consistently called out as a ripe opportunity for its network and future profitability.

“We’re seeing significant traction and interest today in private networks and private 5G networks, and the architecture that we’re deploying really enables a level of control and a much deeper level of security that allows the enterprise to utilize that network for their own business operations,” Bye said. 

He added that Dish is responding to multiple requests from enterprises and currently working on proof of concepts. “We’re seeing interest across every vertical and every industrial segment and we’re very well positioned to take the architecture that we’re deploying, being cloud native but also the open architecture and the ability to do slicing, it is distinctively unique compared to what the operators have in the market today.”

While Dish can’t effectively compete for nationwide enterprise requirements today, it can address needs in specific markets or scenarios where it can build a private network to meet more local use cases, Ergen contended. “The profitability on a per bit, on a per dollar of capex, and a per-gigabit basis is going to be much higher in the enterprise business than it will be in the consumer business,” he said. 

“In many cases, we’re the only guys that can really, in the foreseeable future, fit their needs,” Ergen said, adding that he doesn’t expect enterprises to generate much revenue for Dish in 2022. 

Dish banked $671 million in net income on $4.49 billion in revenue during the quarter. The company spent almost $201 million on network-related property and equipment during the quarter and said it expects network-related capex to increase substantially throughout the remainder of 2021. Dish maintains that it can build a nationwide 5G network for $10 billion.