Dish is doing something that hasn't been done in decades, and some things that have never been done before. We took an exclusive trip to three new Dish "Project Genesis" cities to see how the company is building the first new nationwide cell phone network in decades.
Under the gimlet eye of the FCC, the former satellite-TV company is the first new nationwide carrier in the US this century. It's doing this with odds and ends of spectrum and using a flexible, mix-and-match network setup that no one outside Japan has pulled off before.
Dish was required to launch its service covering 20% of the US population by June 14, and at the end of that day, it started selling its "Project Genesis" in more than 120 cities. So we hopped on a bus to hit three of them—Ithaca, Syracuse, and Utica in New York—with a retail Samsung Galaxy S22 we purchased from Dish.
For now, Dish has one phone—a $399.99 Galaxy S22—and one service plan, a $30 "unlimited everything" plan. The carrier also sells a hotspot, the Netgear Nighthawk M6, with a $20 plan.
These smaller cities show Dish's unusual focus, and the true potential for what it can add to the US wireless landscape. Smaller cities don't often get new technologies first, but Dish is putting places like Ithaca (pop. 32,000) and Utica (pop. 60,000) front and center.
Project Genesis: Time to Help Out
Dish currently only offers Project Genesis on a specially kitted-out, small Samsung Galaxy S22, which it's essentially selling for half price. Dish told me that it chose the S22 because it's a popular, high-end device. It's also the first phone that supports 3.45GHz airwaves(Opens in a new window), of which Dish owns a bunch although it hasn't started broadcasting on them yet.
When you get the Dish S22, the first thing that starts up is the Project Genesis app. It’s basically a feedback app, giving you little gamified tasks for points and free accessories. But what it really wants you to do is use the network a lot and provide feedback. All your Project Genesis data goes back into Dish's network build, directing the company on how to build and fix its network.
The gamified Project Genesis app
If this sounds like a beta, it feels like a beta, too. Legally, Dish is required to "offer service" to 20% of the US population, and it does, but as you'll see, the service is...pretty rocky.
You can't just put your Dish SIM into another phone because there is some weird firmware stuff going on here. Somehow, the phone is using both its physical SIM and its secondary eSIM in tandem. In the phone's settings, Dish shows up as your single, primary SIM. But if you go into Samsung's field test mode, there's what appears to be an AT&T eSIM in slot 1, and the Dish physical SIM in slot 2. They're linked somehow through software.
Yes, there's someone on Reddit who put their Dish SIM into an iPhone(Opens in a new window), but I'm pretty sure it just becomes an AT&T SIM in that case, as he reports that it doesn't have standalone 5G, which is a major point of the Dish network.
Dish says it will have more phones available later this year. (It has to, because of what I uncovered about performance!)
Coverage: Very Early Days
When I wasn't on Dish, I was on AT&T, and I was on AT&T much of the time.
The phone doesn't indicate what network you're on in the status bar, but if it's anything but standalone 5G, it's AT&T. (Dish has the nation's first pure standalone 5G network.) When I made a phone call, it was always on AT&T. But here's a hot take: That’s not bad. AT&T has a reliable network with great coverage in Upstate New York.
On the maps below, orange is Dish coverage and blue is AT&T.
Utica, NY
The best Dish coverage I saw was in Utica. It isn't citywide, but Dish covers significant parts of the city with what appears to be multiple sites appropriately handing off to each other.
You see some blue overlapping with orange near the downtown area. That's from two different time periods, sometimes just an hour apart. In Ithaca and Syracuse, I had a lot of trouble getting data sessions to start on the Dish network and the phone would often time out, fall down to 4G, or show “no data connection.” That was less common in Utica.
Ithaca, NY
In Ithaca, I connected to what felt like three cell sites: at Ithaca College, on the Cornell campus north of the creek, and in suburban Dryden (east of the map area above). In all the rest of Ithaca—Collegetown, downtown, in the shopping area southwest of downtown—I was on AT&T.
The phone often had trouble making connections on the Dish network in Ithaca, sometimes stalling and dropping back to AT&T, but I got some web page loads and speed tests done. Speeds were incredibly slow at 1-5Mbps down, and less than 1Mbps up.
Syracuse, NY
I had only an hour to walk around Syracuse. I found two cell sites: one just north of Syracuse University and one south of the city. In downtown, Westcott, and the Near Eastside neighborhoods, as well as up by the train station, I was on AT&T.
I don't think Dish is trying to pull a fast one on the FCC, but I think it came up against a legal deadline it had to meet, no matter what shape the network was in. And it's in very early shape.
5 Is the Loneliest Number
Dish has a big problem in Upstate New York right now, and it's the number 5.
The problem isn't the G, it's the MHz. Everywhere I went, the Dish network was using only 5MHz of band n71, alone. That's "4G network in 2012" levels of spectrum usage, and yep, it has about the performance of a 4G network in 2012.
Getting maps on the Transit app doesn't take much bandwidth
The network did better in Utica than in Ithaca and Syracuse. Many times I tried to run a test or browse a web page while on Dish's native network in the latter two cities, my browser would give me a "no Internet" error or the phone would fall back to AT&T.
I could make and receive phone calls while in a “coverage but no data” state, because voice calling was going over AT&T even while the Dish network data connection was having trouble.
Data performance on AT&T was much faster than Dish's native network, but with really long latencies. I got up to 217Mbps down, but latencies regularly reached the 300-400ms range. That felt like a bug (and might have had to do with the speed test app I was using). On Dish's network, speed test latencies ranged from 69ms to an eye-popping 839ms.
Compared to a native AT&T phone in an AT&T-but-not-Dish coverage area using a speed test app, the two devices had almost the exact same speeds (120Mbps down, 37-41Mbps up), but the Dish device had much longer latencies (200-350ms compared to 30-40ms on the AT&T device).
In Utica, I was getting 18Mbps down and 2Mbps up on Dish's network and I was able to:
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Check maps and bus times in Google Maps and the Transit app
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Send video and audio texts in Google Messages
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Download a PDF menu from a restaurant website
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Listen to "Don't Stop Believin'" streaming on YouTube Music (because I don't)
I did not, in fact, stop believin'. This is music streaming on Dish in Utica
You don't need a lot of speed for most of the things you do online. Dish's bigger problem is potential congestion: 5MHz will get almost unusably congested very quickly if a lot of people sign up for this service. Of course, Dish can shove excess customers onto AT&T's network, but that seems to defeat the point of this exercise.
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What Dish Needs Now
Dish owns more than 100MHz of airwaves in Upstate New York, but right now it can't use them. According to Spectrum Omega(Opens in a new window), Dish owns:
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6MHz of band n29 (no phones support this)
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40MHz of band n70(Opens in a new window) (no phones support this)
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20MHz of downlink-only n66 (not sure why they aren't using this, but I didn't see it)
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40MHz of n77 at 3.45GHz (the S22 supports this, but base stations don't yet)
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A bunch of complicated licenses at 3.5-3.65GHz
So in total that's like 20 times the spectrum my phone was using on Project Genesis. This makes it absolutely critical for Dish to get phone makers to support its n29 and n70 bands, because otherwise, none of this is going to work when there's more than a handful of people on the system.
The FCC approved two Motorola phones with band n70 back in March, but those phones haven't yet appeared on the market with that band.
Dish's situation isn't as tough in some of its other markets. In its showcase market of Las Vegas, it has double the n71 I saw—10MHz—as well as some working n66, which means much smoother performance than a 5MHz sliver alone. But Dish had to show 20% population coverage for the FCC, so some of that's going to be the sliver.
The ‘N600’ on the screen here shows that Dish is operating in band n71
For its 3.45GHz, support will probably appear later this year as the base station equipment becomes available. AT&T is heavily invested in making 3.45GHz work, and that band should work on a Galaxy S22 without problems. That would be a huge improvement in performance for Dish.
Curiously, in Syracuse but not the other two cities I tested, Dish owns an extra 10MHz of usable n66. There's no hardware reason I can think of why that wouldn't be usable, but I checked, and it wasn't being used.
Should You Buy Project Genesis?
Although Dish is offering it publicly to everyone, its Project Genesis network, the way it is now, is clearly an extended beta. You're asked to give input to help improve the network.
Some PCMag readers will say "heck yeah." I mean, a $30 unlimited plan on AT&T undercuts both AT&T and Cricket plans in a big way. But there's some peril in that.
The fastest speed test I got on the Dish network in Utica
When you're near a Dish tower, you're going to be on Dish. Until we get phones and equipment that support n29, n70, and 3.45GHz, that may be very slow and even buggy performance in places like Upstate New York.
I also received a ton of spam calls on the new Dish phone. I don't know whether that's just because the number was recycled, or whether Dish doesn't have the level of spam filtering other carriers have put in place.
What's Next for Dish and Project Genesis?
This is very, very much just the beginning for this new network. At an investor conference in May, Dish EVP of Retail Wireless Stephen Stokols said the company would launch a brand called "Boost Infinite" this fall. I think that's going to be the real retail launch for Dish's network, and it’ll have worked out a lot of the bugs by then.
Hopefully, by the fall, there will be 3.45GHz base station equipment (AT&T wants it, badly), phones that support n29 and n70, and a much better-debugged network. "Project Genesis" is only being sold online, largely to people in the know; Boost Infinite, presumably, will be sold through Boost stores nationwide.
Dish made its FCC deadline. Now it's facing another tough deadline: it needs to cover 70% of the US population(Opens in a new window) by June 14, 2023. The network is going to grow, and it's going to grow fast. Hopefully, by the end of 2022 it'll be time for more people to jump on board.
Chicken riggies, the culinary specialty of Utica. This was made with penne, though, because I have celiac and that was the place's gluten-free pasta
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