Dish Network remains locked in, racing against its latest deadline to activate 5G service in its first market this fall, and revealing more vendors central to that effort.

Dell Technologies, the latest in a long line of more than 30 open radio access network (RAN) vendors named to date, will provide Dish with an “edge network infrastructure foundation” for devices, software, and services running at the edge, the companies announced.

“By collaborating with Dell Technologies, we will have the hardware and software infrastructure needed to harness the power and potential of 5G. Dell’s open ecosystem approach will help us scale our RAN with agility, speed, and consistency, bringing about new business opportunities for both enterprise customers and consumers, completing our cloud strategy,” Marc Rouanne, Dish’s chief network officer, said in a statement.

Dell Technologies is assembling what it describes as cloud-native network infrastructure with a full stack of open and scalable servers and software to make bigger waves in the wireless and fixed communications market. 

“As the telecommunications networks open up and become more about virtualized workloads running on industry-standard hardware, they become addressable in a way, for what we normally do, that they haven’t been historically,” Dennis Hoffman, SVP and GM of Dell’s Telecom Systems Business, told SDxCentral earlier this month.

Dell will supply Dish with open hardware and software, and zero-touch provisioning and deployment of container network functions (CNFs). The companies are also partnering on the development of private 5G networks, software-defined WAN, and multi-access edge cloud platforms. 

The joint effort will lead to new open RAN technology, smartNICs, automation, and “micro-edge colocation” for enterprises and small businesses, the companies said. Dell EMC PowerEdge servers will be installed at Dish’s cell tower sites and in centralized RAN locations. The operator also plans to use Dell’s recently released Apex as-a-service offering, which merges Dell Technologies Cloud and the vendor’s consumption-based IT services on demand. 

“We chose to leverage Dell’s technology because they have a demonstrated track record of transforming networks and a willingness to work with us on designing and implementing infrastructure as a code. With their help, we’re another step closer to deploying the United States’ first cloud-native, open RAN 5G network,” Rouanne added.

Dell joins VMware, Amazon Web Services (AWS), and others in helping Dish to reach that goal. The aspiring greenfield operator is using VMware’s Telco Cloud Platform RAN as an abstraction layer running across multiple network domains, allowing it to tap into hyperscale public cloud capacity while maintaining core control points.

Dish is housing everything it can in the cloud and, for it, that cloud is entirely AWS. “Everything north of the base station, the site, is in the cloud,” Rouanne said in April when Dish announced its deal with AWS. The operator is also working with AWS to target multiple options for edge computing.

One of those options involves the use of AWS Outposts, a small rack of Amazon-supplied equipment and fully managed services that effectively places the AWS cloud directly into an enterprise’s network. That will allow Dish, which claims it will be AWS’ largest customer in the cloud, to put its software, riding on AWS, at the edge, Rouanne explained.

“Dish is breaking new ground by building a cloud-native 5G network designed for a future where edge computing and new 5G use cases collide in ways we haven’t thought of yet,” Hoffman said in a statement.