Satellite DTH broadcaster Dish Network and US telco Sprint have announced that they will jointly develop and deploy a fixed wireless broadband service, on a trial basis, in Corpus Christi, Texas.
The service, which will be available from mid-2014, will…
Satellite DTH broadcaster Dish Network and US telco Sprint have announced that they will jointly develop and deploy a fixed wireless broadband service, on a trial basis, in Corpus Christi, Texas.
The service, which will be available from mid-2014, will use Sprint’s 2.5 GHz spectrum, which it acquired from Clearwire earlier this year, while Dish will install either a ruggedized outdoor router or an indoor router to receive the 4G TDD-LTE signals.
Marci Ryvivker, senior analyst at Wells Fargo, pointed out that while this trial does not utilize Dish’s spectrum, an identical service using the company’s band could be done quite quickly.
Ryvivker added that the biggest takeaway from the agreement is that Dish and Sprint have partnered given the tensions that followed the former’s attempt’s to buy the latter earlier this year. The analyst suggests that this could be a potential start to a new relationship.
This is in fact Dish’s second fixed wireless broadband trial having announced a similar test with nTelos in October. That test takes place in four cities in Virginia and is targeting an early 2014 roll out.
Speaking on Dish’s Q2 results call back in August, chairman Charlie Ergen said that he considered a network partnership with a telecoms operator to be his preference after the company failed in its attempts to buy both Sprint and Clearwire. He even floated the idea of partnering with the Softbank-controlled Sprint.
