The time I visited a Dish 5G cell site

LAS VEGAS – This week, I made a call on Dish’s 5G network here. I called Dave Mayo, the Dish executive in charge of building the company’s network. After the call, we visited one of Dish Network’s nearby 5G cell towers.

This is the story of what I saw and what I learned. If you’re looking for the TL;DR version: The quality of the call on Dish’s network was fine. And it provided speeds around 250 Mbit/s.

I was in Las Vegas this week for the NATE Unite conference. NATE is the trade association that represents the nation’s cell tower climbers, and its Unite trade conference this year attracted a record 2,500 attendees. A big draw was a Wednesday keynote appearance by Charlie Ergen, Dish’s chairman and the architect of the company’s big 5G gamble.

First time caller

On Wednesday morning, a few hours before Ergen’s keynote, I got a surprise call from a Dish representative: Did I want to take a tour of a Dish 5G cell site in the next 15 minutes? I dropped everything and jumped into a nondescript minivan for a quick drive to one of the roughly 150 cell sites that Dish currently operates in Las Vegas. My tour guide was Mayo, who asked if I wanted to make a test call on Dish’s brand-new network on the way there.

Oh sure, I said, trying not to sound too excited.

Mayo handed me his Samsung Galaxy S21 and explained that Dish’s network in Vegas currently runs across three spectrum bands: Band 71 (600MHz), Band 66 (AWS) and Band 70 (AWS-4). Dish does own licenses in other spectrum bands – from 3.5GHz CBRS to 3.45GHz-3.55GHz – but hasn’t yet deployed the radio equipment necessary to put them into action.

The 600MHz spectrum licenses Dish bought for around $6 billion in a 2017 FCC auction form the core of Dish’s 5G coverage footprint in Vegas and elsewhere. In that respect, Dish is using the exact same 5G strategy as T-Mobile, which first built a 5G coverage layer with its 600MHz licenses in 2020 and is now supplementing that with the 2.5GHz spectrum it acquired from Sprint. Mayo’s Galaxy S21 supports Dish’s Band 66 and Band 71 spectrum holdings, but Dish hasn’t yet announced any devices that support its unique Band 70 holdings.

Test driving

Regardless, my call didn’t go through on Mayo’s Galaxy S21. Instead, I used the S21 of another Dish executive – Suman Sharma, wireless senior manager – whose phone was properly configured for calls on the network.

The call connected quickly and the quality of the call was fine. And while that doesn’t sound like a major accomplishment, it is. That’s because my call from Sharma’s phone connected to a nearby Fujitsu open RAN radio (no other 5G provider in the US supports Fujitsu or open RAN) and it did so via Voice over NR (VoNR) technology. VoNR (pronounced “voner,” which is hilarious, I know) is a brand new technology that pushes voice calls over 5G, and Dish ought to be the first operator in the US to launch it commercially. Verizon, AT&T and other 5G operators in the US currently use their legacy 4G networks for voice calling.

Then, after Fujitsu’s radio connected my VoNR call, my brief conversation with Mayo traveled through a completely virtualized, cloud-native, software-defined network architecture supported by vendors such as VMware, Mavenir and Amazon Web Services (AWS). This, too, is completely unique. The difference between Dish’s 5G network and the networks of operators like T-Mobile and Verizon is sort of like the difference between a Tesla Model X and a 1986 Ford Tempo – they’ll both get you from one place to another using wheels, but the technologies they rely on to do so could not be any more different.

Peeking under the hood

But don’t just take my word for it. Take a look at this Dish cell site in Las Vegas and check it out for yourself:

Dish’s Fujitsu radios and JMA antennas sit at the very top of this tower, which is owned by cell tower giant American Tower. Because Dish is using open RAN, it can mix and match equipment from a variety of vendors (Dish’s other radio vendor is MTI and its other antenna vendors include CommScope, CellMax and KMW). The ring of radios below those from Dish are for Verizon. Like AT&T and T-Mobile, Verizon uses traditional 5G equipment from big vendors like Samsung and Ericsson that generally cannot be mixed and matched. Click here for a larger version of this image.
(Source: Light Reading)

To be clear, Dish’s 5G radios look a lot like Verizon’s radios. Verizon has more radios on this tower because its network stretches across more spectrum bands, including its newly deployed C-band holdings (there are C-band radios on this tower). Further, Mayo explained that Verizon’s radios are lower on the tower because Verizon has split up this particular cell site into multiple spectral chunks, or “cells,” to support more customers.

But the truly unique part of Dish’s 5G network is located at the base of its cell towers.

To read the complete article, visit Light Reading.