Charles Ergen, president and co-founder of Dish Network Corp.
Jonathan Alcorn | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Shares of Dish Network closed nearly 11% on Wednesday, hitting unprecedented prices in mid-2019, after the satellite TV company announced a partnership with Amazon Web Services to deploy a 5G network on the cloud provider’s infrastructure.
Dish, in addition to sharing videos, is trying to become the fourth national wireless player, behind T-Mobile, Verizon and AT&T. The deal with Amazon is an essential part of Dish’s plan to develop a network from scratch, which can deliver more reliable 5G speeds more efficiently than its old competition.
It is also essential that Dish start offering services by mid-2023. Then it risks losing its wireless spectrum licenses if Dish has not yet developed an operational wireless network.
Dish will begin operating “the first independent, cloud-based 5G open radio access network in the United States, starting with Las Vegas later this year,” the company said in a statement on Wednesday. The statement said Amazon and Dish will work together to see how organizations, including Amazon and AWS, use 5G or build their own networks. The terms of the agreement were not disclosed.
Dave Brown, vice president of AWS ‘basic Elastic Compute Cloud service, told CNBC’s TechCheck on Wednesday that the collaboration with Dish will serve “absolutely” as a kind of case study that Amazon can take to other providers. telecommunications to show that 5G networks can run in the cloud, rather than in data centers with special infrastructure.
This could help Amazon expand its own cloud business, a key source of revenue that has increased revenue by almost 30% in 2020.
Meanwhile, Microsoft, the second largest cloud infrastructure provider behind Amazon, also wants to get operators building 5G networks in its cloud. AT&T uses the Microsoft Azure cloud, and last year Microsoft acquired two companies targeting carriers.
AWS is already working with Verizon, the largest wireless service provider in the United States.
– CNBC’s Alex Sherman contributed to this report.
VIEW: Amazon Web Services, Dish team up for 5G cloud-based networking