The fourth-largest US wireless service provider as of Sprint’s recent disappearance is moving ahead with its ambitious plans of challenging the industry status quo, but if anyone expected to actually be able to use the incredibly advanced Dish 5G network this year, the latest news on the rookie carrier’s buildout front may come as a rather unpleasant surprise.
2022 is when the action will begin in earnest
Cities like Orlando, Florida and Washington, D.C. should follow suit with beta tests of their own relatively quickly (perhaps even by the end of 2021 as well), but of course, it’s not entirely clear if this “beta” program will be public and open to anyone.
That number is down by 201,000 net subscribers from Dish’s Q1 total, a loss that the satellite TV veteran attributes to various “operational changes, competitive pressures, ongoing optimizations to the existing business and wireless device shortages.”
Solid overall financial figures, promising wireless future
By no means a good result for a company looking to add millions and millions of mobile customers in the next years in a bid for industry relevance, that decline was actually smaller than what many analysts predicted for Q2.
Going forward, the same analysts continue to believe in the company’s potential to “disrupt the wireless industry as we know it” while reiterating their warning about said prospective disruption being unlikely to happen sooner than several years down the line.
On the bright side, the company’s overall financial performance remains robust, with its operating businesses generating a cool $2.5 billion in cash over the last year alone, thus creating a comfortable cushion for its 5G network development efforts to continue unperturbed.
