With Dish Network owner EchoStar selling $23 billion in valuable spectrum to AT&T, any pretense that the TV provider will become a serious wireless competitor is dead. But the project was always doomed to fail, and despite plenty of assurances by the Trump administration and other companies involved, the very obvious writing was always on the wall.
More than 9,000 T-Mobile employees lost their jobs, the wireless sector stopped seriously competing on price, and T-Mobile increasingly began to behave exactly like the competitors it once promised to disrupt.
To downplay the harm from the T-Mobile deal, Trump officials worked with Dish and T-Mobile to construct a complicated plan they claimed would counter the harms of consolidation. Under the proposal, Dish would acquire Boost Mobile from Sprint — and valuable spectrum from T-Mobile — to cobble together a fourth wireless competitor and restore balance to the US wireless market.
The plan was destined for failure. US regulators, with a history of coddling telecoms, never really seemed capable of the kind of competent oversight required to nanny the build to fruition. The two remaining US wireless industry giants, AT&T and Verizon, were heavily incentivized to lobby the government to ensure added competition never materialized.
Dish Network also had very little experience in wireless, which became obvious when The Verge found Dish’s 5G network to be a disappointing mess with limited phone support, patchy coverage, middling connectivity speeds, and a janky website and sign up process.
As part of the deal, Dish struck an agreement with the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) that the new network would reach 75 percent of the country using its valuable spectrum assets. And while the company met some early deadlines, it didn’t take long for Dish to start missing debt interest payments, forcing the FCC to grant extensions to prevent the plan from becoming an embarrassment.
With growing talk of a potential bankruptcy, Dish managed to buy itself a little time by orchestrating an all-stock merger with EchoStar in 2023, a deal the companies insisted would create “a global leader in terrestrial and non-terrestrial wireless connectivity.”
But with hints that Dish’s wireless ambitions were already circling the drain, the remaining wireless giants (and Space X) began hungrily eyeing the company’s valuable spectrum assets. Last May, the FCC, led by Brendan Carr, announced it was launching an investigation into Dish and EchoStar’s compliance with FCC 5G buildout requirements.
Carr’s threats to pull EchoStar’s spectrum licenses (less than a year after the company had negotiated an extension with the previous administration) annoyed unions, consumer groups, and “free market” Conservative groups alike, albeit for different reasons.
EchoStar’s sale of $23 billion in Dish spectrum licenses to AT&T this week appears to be the direct result of direct pressure by Trump officials. The arrangement demolishes Dish’s ambition to become a fourth wireless carrier, empowers AT&T as a dominant carrier, and ends any hopes that the US can fix the competitive harm caused by the merger of Sprint and T-Mobile.
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