Charles Ergen, president and co-founder of Dish Network Corp.
Jonathan Alcorn | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Shares of Dish Network closed nearly 11% on Wednesday, reaching prices not seen since mid-2019, after the satellite TV company announced a partnership with Amazon Web Services to deploy a 5G network to the UK. cloud provider infrastructure.
Dish is trying to become the fourth national wireless player, behind T-Mobile, Verizon and AT&T, in addition to distributing video. The deal with Amazon is an essential piece of Dish’s plan to develop a network from scratch that can offer more reliable 5G speeds than its inherited competition. It’s also key for Dish to start offering service in mid-2023. That’s when Dish runs the risk of losing wireless spectrum licenses if it hasn’t yet developed an operational wireless network.
Dish will begin operating “the first autonomous cloud-based 5G radio access network in the United States, which will begin in Las Vegas later this year,” the company said in a statement. The statement says Amazon and Dish will work together to see how organizations like Amazon and AWS use 5G or create 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 “Tech Check” on Wednesday that the partnership with Dish will serve “absolutely” as a kind of case study that Amazon can take to other vendors. to demonstrate that 5G networks can run in clouds, rather than in data centers with special-use infrastructures.
This could help Amazon expand its own business to the cloud, a key source of revenue that increased revenue by nearly 30% in 2020.
Meanwhile, Microsoft, the second largest cloud infrastructure provider behind Amazon, is also willing to get operators to build 5G networks in their cloud. AT&T uses Microsoft’s Azure cloud and last year Microsoft acquired two companies aimed at operators.
AWS is already working with Verizon, the largest wireless provider in the United States.
– CNBC’s Alex Sherman contributed to this report.
SEE: Amazon Web Services, Dish joins the cloud-based 5G network