A brief history of Dish's many attempts to break into wireless

[Commentary] The only reason Dish's reported merger talks with T-Mobile should come as a surprise is if you haven't been watching the company at all over the past few years. Sure, the merger might be a consolation prize for both companies, but for Dish in particular it would be a win after a long and probably frustrating string of losses. For at least four years now -- and probably longer -- Chairman Charlie Ergen has been striving to find ways to get Dish involved in a real wireless network. The company has fought with the Federal Communications Commission, juggled wireless spectrum, and been in talks with more companies than you might remember. Dish has been grasping, and these T-Mobile rumors are just the latest in a long string of rumors about the company.

So you might be tempted to count Dish out, to assume that this is just a quixotic quest and that Ergen and his company are more likely to dangle from a windmill than to build an actual cell tower on top of one. But you shouldn't count Dish out just yet. It's not just that the only tech executive who's more unfiltered than Ergen happens to be T-Mobile's CEO John Legere, it's that interspersed with the wireless losses is a story of a very important win. Dish's Hopper DVR famously added the ability to skip commercials and even more famously led to a huge row with television networks. Yet even as Dish capitulated on ad skipping, it won real concessions: the ability to stream content from those networks over the internet. The result was Sling TV, the first real, live TV streaming service in the US with any kind of meaningful scale. Yes, Dish's many (many!) attempts to get into wireless seem crazy when you see them listed out like this. But maybe, just maybe, Dish will finally be able to claim it's crazy like a fox.