Samsung to back Dish’s 5G rollout in US

Samsung Electronics said Wednesday it was selected by Dish Wireless, the fourth-largest telecom carrier in the United States, to jointly deploy a commercial fifth-generational network across the country.

Samsung said it would become the second-largest network equipment supply deal in the US if signed, following a $6.6 billion contract with Verizon announced in 2020. The size of the deal was not disclosed, but local reports speculate the deal to be as large as 1 trillion won ($794 million).

The multiyear deal is expected to “give (Dish) the flexibility to deploy our cloud-native network with software-based solutions that support advanced services and operational scalability,” John Swieringa, president and chief operating officer of Dish Wireless.

This comes as Dish aims to cover 70 percent of the US population with broadband 5G network by the end of June 2023.

According to the statements, Samsung and Dish will collaborate to deploy Samsung’s virtualized radio access network solutions and radio units such as massive MIMO, which are compliant with 5G open radio access network, across the 5G network by Dish.

The Open RAN deployment, based on open interfaces, will enable multi-vendor interoperability and various deployment scenarios in order to achieve a diverse 5G network ecosystem, the companies said.

“Our advanced 5G vRAN and radio solutions bring telco-grade quality and cloud-based agility together,” noted Mark Louison, executive vice president and head of the Networks Business at Samsung Electronics America.

The companies added their partnership will extend to retail wireless customers, providing them with 5G devices. Dish is currently testing its 5G network using the Samsung’s flagship smartphone Galaxy S22 as a reference platform.

Dish earned a mobile carrier license and obtained a wireless spectrum in the United States in 2020 via Dish Wireless and has some 8.6 million retail mobile subscribers as of end-2021.

Dish Wireless has telco arms including Boost Mobile and Ting Mobile. It is owned by Dish Network, a US pay TV service provider with over 10 million subscribers.

(consnow@heraldcorp.com)