The head of Dish Network’s 5G wireless deployment this week joined the keynote stage at AWS re:Invent to talk about, but not show, the capabilities of the repeatedly delayed service.
Happenstance and opportunity brought Marc Rouanne, Dish Network’s EVP and chief network officer, to Las Vegas, the home of the aspiring greenfield operator’s first 5G market and Amazon Web Services’ longtime locale for its annual conference. He undoubtedly hoped to be able to share more this week.
Dish co-founder and Chair Charlie Ergen recently said the company’s 5G beta service would be available for some people to test during this week’s event. Alas, that didn’t happen — at least not publicly.
Dish Exec Envisions ‘Network of Networks’ for Enterprise
Rouanne instead reiterated the company’s vision to deploy a “network of networks” with a heavy emphasis on features that Dish hopes to deploy to attract enterprises.
Dish Network’s cloud native 5G wireless network riding on open radio access network (RAN) architecture is a “first in the telecom industry and we’re doing it with AWS,” he said, claiming “the results will be a game changer for businesses across the industry and enterprises.”
While legacy carriers have been upgrading the same hardware and infrastructure since the days of 2G, Dish sees an opportunity to do more by building a wireless network for use beyond smartphones, according to Rouanne.
“We’re building the first architecture that is truly optimized for the cloud. It promises tremendous advances, not just for human communications, but also for machine to machine, and of course for humans to control those machines,” he added.
Dish envisions a framework that will allow enterprises to define the experience with sub networks, or network slices, providing customization on speed, latency, data requirements, and other features.
AWS Plays Outsized Role in Dish’s 5G Network
AWS contributes to and factors heavily in that vision. “In fact, some say we are the AWS of wireless,” Rouanne boasted. “Dish, with the power of AWS, will now transform wireless connectivity, providing a customer experience the way AWS does for cloud computing.”
Dish intends to house everything it can in the cloud and, that cloud is entirely AWS. To that point, Ergen earlier this year claimed Dish will be AWS’ largest customer in the cloud, adding that AWS may be the largest customer in Dish’s network.
AWS Outposts GM Joshua Burgin explained that Dish Network is using a mixture of AWS Regions, Local Zones, and Outposts, specifically the smaller form factor Outposts servers released this week, to power its network. This includes the deployment of single 1U Outpost servers, some with an accelerator card, to run network functions in single-digit milliseconds at cell sites, he said in a phone interview.
AWS Local Zones, which are built on Outpost racks and span 15 locations around the U.S., some of which were deployed to meet Dish’s demands, will run Dish’s less latency-sensitive functions, Burgin explained. Finally, Dish’s operations and business support systems will run on AWS Regions, he said.
Dish hasn’t yet adopted Wavelength, a service AWS first launched with Verizon to marry network operators’ 5G networks with AWS’ edge compute service, but that could come down the line, according to Burgin.
AWS Powers Trio of Unique 5G Features
Rouanne outlined a trio of features that Dish intends to enable as a result of its work with AWS. “On Dish 5G, companies will be able to utilize aggregated and anonymized data to identify patterns and improve customer experience,” he said.
“Second, AWS is helping us drive automation at scale. And it matters because we are going to have hundreds of networks and we’ll need to manage the complexity,” Rouanne said.
Finally, he said, AWS will allow Dish to connect the edge to the cloud in a more simplified manner. “With our cloud architecture, we want to drastically simplify the edge and make running software at the edge as simple as making a phone call,” he said.
Because cloud native software provides Dish the opportunity to make changes at the speed of the cloud, it can scale services up and down at will, Rouanne said. “We can literally move the software around, and north and south in hours, which would have taken years in existing networks because it’s tied to tons of hardware.”
Dish’s Las Vegas market launch was delayed due to the work required to get its open RAN and core network software working well together with reliable performance, Dave Mayo, EVP of network development, said last month during the company’s earnings call.
“We’re in beta test mode, and we’ll progress that over the course of the next 90 days, and look forward to launching Vegas sometime in the first quarter of 2022,” he said.
The company also, as recently as last month, claimed widespread construction activities were underway in 42 markets. Dish is required to cover at least 70% of the U.S. population with 5G in 2023, a footprint that effectively requires the company to provide service in every U.S. city with a population greater than 500,000 people.
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December 02, 2021 at 09:33PM
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Dish Misses Another 5G Marker at AWS re:Invent - SDxCentral
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