Monica Alleven

Dish Network’s Boost Mobile announced plans to acquire Gen Mobile, a Los Angeles (CA)-based prepaid mobile service provider specializing in serving “cost-conscious” consumers. Boost will be acquiring an undisclosed number of subscribers through the acquisition, but Stephen Stokols, who heads Boost and will oversee the Gen Mobile brand, said a key thing is the connection to bridging the digital divide. Dish is starting to move upmarket with Boost Mobile, but at the same time, “we don’t want to ignore the under-served market,” he said.

AT&T responded to the alarm industry’s attempts to keep the 3G network up and running, essentially chalking it up to a delay tactic designed to line the pockets of alarm companies. While all three of the major US wireless operators are shutting down their 3G networks, the alarm industry is especially reliant on AT&T. That’s in part because AT&T offered aggressive pricing deals back when 3G networks were just getting started. Fast forward to 2021, and those alarm companies are in no hurry to switch to newer networks.

Consumer groups are still very much concerned about what happens if TracFone gets acquired by Verizon even though Verizon promises to serve the public interest.

Facebook’s desire to connect more people to the internet is well known. Signals Research Group (SRG) published a report assessing how the company's Terragraph initiative performs outside of trial situations. Terragraph is a fixed wireless access platform that uses 60 GHz spectrum. It’s unlicensed, so other applications can use the spectrum, creating interference concerns.

It’s quite possible that Dish Network could strike a network service agreement with a rural or regional US operator, along the same lines as it did with AT&T. Granted, the deal with AT&T is on a bigger scale, but the same principles apply.

Few probably would have guessed that the telecommunications industry would still be waiting around in late July for the Biden Administration to name a permanent Federal Communications Commission chair, but that’s where things stand. One name that has been floated in recent weeks is that of long-time public activist Gigi Sohn [a senior fellow at the Benton Institute for Broadband & Society], who was on the staff of former Chairman Tom Wheeler and led the consumer group Public Knowledge for more than a decade.

Long-time analyst Craig Moffett said "AT&T has let Dish off the hook" in Dish's new services agreement with AT&T, which guarantees AT&T at least $5 billion in wholesale revenue over ten years. With a two-year “transition period” on top, it is arguably more like a twelve-year deal, and that’s a “huge, game-changing win” for Dish, Moffett said.

AT&T now covers more than 250 million people across the US with its flavor of 5G, which includes low-band spectrum in large parts of the country. It reached that goal a full six months earlier than originally planned. The company uses dynamic spectrum sharing, which allowed it to speed its 5G deployment by putting it on top of its LTE network. Its millimeter wave (mmWave) technology, which it calls 5G Plus, is now in parts of 38 cities and 20 venues, with plans to be in parts of 40 cities and 40 venues by the end of 2021.

SpaceX said it’s up to Dish and its allies to show their proposed use of 12Ghz spectrum won’t harm satellite companies.

Dish Network has its sights set on the 12 GHz band for 5G, and it isn’t backing down, even in the face of some pretty stiff competition. Dish—which is in the process of building out a cloud-native, open RAN-based 5G network—itself uses the 12 GHz band for direct broadcast satellite (DBS). Yet it says sharing with 5G in the band is feasible, and while it still wants to support the diminishing TV satellite business (DBS) business, it’s confident that sharing isn’t going to hurt those customers.