Dish’s biggest cloud turns out to be Microsoft, not AWS

COPENHAGEN – Digital Transformation World – No big telecom operator has embraced the public cloud as enthusiastically as Dish Network.

Better known in the US consumer market for its pay-TV services, the company founded by American billionaire Charlie Ergen is pumping billions of dollars into the rollout of a new mobile network based on the latest software and Internet technologies.

While operators have traditionally used on-premises equipment and private clouds to host IT workloads and network resources, Dish is entrusting just about anything it can to AWS.

Yet the public cloud provider supporting most Dish subscribers today is not AWS but Microsoft Azure.

Thanks to a roaming deal with AT&T, Dish provides 4G services to millions of customers through mobile virtual network operators (MVNOs) such as Boost Mobile.

It launched its own 5G network in Las Vegas earlier this year, and now claims this covers about a quarter of the US population. But most Dish customers are still MVNO ones on AT&T’s network. And AT&T’s main cloud partner is Microsoft.

It is an overlooked fact that Rick Lievano, the chief technology officer of Microsoft’s telecom business, could not resist highlighting at this week’s Digital Transformation World (DTW) event in Copenhagen.

“Who is running all those subscribers today? They are all running on Azure,” he told Light Reading.

AT&T announced a public cloud partnership with Microsoft in June last year, revealing plans to move its main 5G core into Azure. But Lievano says millions of 4G customers served by Dish on AT&T’s network “are running all their core services on Azure.”

To read the complete article, visit Light Reading.