Dish Network Sidesteps 2020 5G Timeline - SDxCentral

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Dish Network is making progress on the build out of its network, but it’s no longer claiming it will have 5G service deployed in a single U.S. market before the end of the year. 

“We are not commenting on that,” Marc Rouanne, executive VP and chief network officer at DISH, told SDxCentral in a phone interview. “We are on our way to meet our requirements” imposed by the Federal Communications Commission and the company will share more details “when we are ready to show and demonstrate some markets,” he said. 

“We can source what we need. We have pretty much what we need,” Rouanne said, referencing the many agreements Dish has made with vendors during the last six months, including its deal with Intel earlier this week. Other major vendor selections include Altiostar, Fujitsu, Mavenir, VMware, Matrixx, and Nokia.

Dish’s First 5G Cell Site

Dish did activate its first 5G cell site in Littleton, Colorado, earlier this week, according to a LinkedIn post by Dave Mayo, the greenfield operator’s EVP of network deployment. That development near its headquarters was first reported by Light Reading. 

“We’ve been working for about a year with all our vendors,” Rouanne said. “A lot of the testing and integration has happened already” and those advancements are occurring faster than he expected. “The integration complexity is so much lower” in an open radio access network (RAN) environment that “it’s just not comparable,” he said. 

Dish’s network engineers onboarded a series of four cloud network functions in the network in half a day, according to Rouanne, who claimed a similar effort in a traditional network architecture could take up to two years. “We’re just leveraging what happened in the cloud. … The cloud strategy was the first step for us, and we see that automation, onboarding, and testing integration is just coming extremely fast.”

That speed and reduced complexity has also removed the use or need for systems integrators, he claimed. However, VMware and other vendors are doing some of the necessary certification work for Dish prior to deployment.

“What 5G has designed is a discoverable network where you bring in new software that will expose itself, and it will just be onboarded and tested automatically by the network. And we’ve seen it, and we’ve been very impressed with that,” Rouanne said. 

Dish Benefits From Cloud-Native Principles

Dish’s strict adherence to cloud-native principles has been a rewarding experience, but that also means that it’s had to turn away many potential vendors that are not fully cloud native, he explained. While Rouanne described Dish’s pool of selected vendors as nearly complete, he noted that more will be announced in areas that might seem less strategic or visible for components like cabling, cabinets, data center location sourcing, and others.

Rouanne also explained that because Dish is assembling a 5G network powered by an open RAN it doesn’t have to follow the traditional model of assigning geographic footprints to different vendors. “Any vendor can go anywhere in a dynamic manner,” he said, likening to the cloud provider model. “We can mix and match the vendors dynamically at any place, which is also very unique in telco now.”

This strategy applies to hardware and software, but some of those choices are driven by commoditized technology, or what Rouanne describes as classic 3GPP standardized software, while other areas including scheduling, routing, optimization, assurance, and machine learning are being addressed by many competing vendors.

As such, Dish is trying to minimize the number of vendors for commoditized software, but encouraging competition in more specialized areas, according to Rouanne. “Because it’s disaggregated, it’s like bringing your app on your smartphone. When we extract intelligence, we put it in sort of that ecosystem and then we let the vendors compete with innovation,” he said. 

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Dish Network Sidesteps 2020 5G Timeline - SDxCentral
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