‘Pretty Invigorated’ With Building Out 5G Network by 2020, Says Dish CEO Ergen
Dish Network CEO Charlie Ergen is unfazed by skeptics who doubt he still has the energy and stamina to take on the challenge of building out a new 5G network through the end of the decade, he told a questioner on a Wednesday earnings call. “Anytime you can get new challenges, you can get pretty invigorated,” said Ergen, who turns 64 on March 1.
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With Dish’s goal of building a 5G network that will be operational by 2020, “my role is a bit more of a coach than a player, or a bit more of a general manager, maybe, than even a coach,” Ergen said. “We’ve built a good team around here to go out and execute on some of the opportunities that we see out there. But 5G is particularly exciting to me, particularly the internet of things, and so any time you’re passionate about something, you have a different set of energy.”
In IoT deployments for consumers, health care and municipalities, “somebody’s going to lead the way,” said Ergen, “It reminds me a lot, in some degree, of the advent of the internet." At Dish, "we have the core ingredient for the internet of things, which is spectrum, and the ability to connect things, both inside and outside the home," he said. "So I’m excited about that and about what we can do as a company.” Ergen isn't sure Dish “can make a big difference in how you make a phone call,” he said. But “we can make a big, big difference in how you connect things,” he said.
The migration to 5G will cause a “fundamental shift” in wireless technology, so “it makes logical sense” for Dish to monetize its spectrum by building a network that’s “not like current incumbents have,” Ergen said. Dish sees its network as having buildout costs that “are a lot less” than those of incumbent networks, but having “much more capacity than networks do today,” he said. “That’s what we’re focused on.” Dish hasn’t been “standing still,” the CEO said. “We have done a lot in preparation.”
Building a 5G network “reminds me a lot of how we first entered the satellite television business” in the early 1990s, Ergen said. “It was a complex three-year build,” he said. “My experience has been that those things go a lot smoother when you spend a fair amount of your time planning, and not just doing things and then changing things. So I think we’ve spent a lot of time planning, and we feel like we’re in pretty good shape to go out and have a network that can take advantage of it.”
Within the next few months, Dish sees itself “communicating” to the FCC and the financial community “as to exactly what we’re going to be doing” in a 5G network buildout, Ergen said. “We feel comfortable that we can have a very state-of-the-art network, and we think it can be built for materially less than current networks are built for.”