Charles Ergen, Chairman 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 satellite TV company announced a partnership with Amazon Web Services to launch a 5G network on the cloud provider’s infrastructure to deploy.
In addition to distributing video, Dish is trying to become the fourth national wireless player behind T-Mobile, Verizon and AT&T. The agreement with Amazon is an important part of Dish’s plan to develop a new network that can deliver more reliable 5G speeds more efficiently than its heritage competition.
It is also the key that Dish can start offering service by mid-2023. This is when Dish may lose its wireless spectrum licenses if it has not yet developed a wireless network operating network.
Dish will “start operating the first standalone, cloud-based 5G Open Radio Access Network in the United States, later in Las Vegas,” the company said in a statement Wednesday. According to the statement, 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 transaction were not disclosed.
Dave Brown, vice president of AWS’s core Elastic Compute Cloud service, told CNBC’s “TechCheck” on Wednesday that the partnership with Dish will “absolutely” serve as a kind of case study that Amazon can take to other telecommunications providers to demonstrate. that 5G networks run in clouds, rather than in data centers with special purpose infrastructure.
It could help Amazon expand its own cloud business, a major source of revenue that grew by nearly 30% in 2020.
Meanwhile, Microsoft, the second-largest provider of cloud infrastructure behind Amazon, is also keen to get service providers to build 5G networks in their cloud. AT&T uses Microsoft’s Azure cloud, and last year Microsoft acquired two companies that focus on them.
AWS is already working with Verizon, the largest US wireless provider.
– Alex Sherman of CNBC contributed to this report.
WATCH: Amazon Web Services, Dish team up for cloud-based 5G network