Stephen Bye shares Dish's network progress at FCC Open RAN event

Dish Chief Commercial Officer Stephen Bye gave updates on the company's 5G network progress at the Federal Communications Commission Open RAN Solutions Showcase. Bye touted Dish’s operations support system and business support system, which the company has said it is getting from Amazon Web Services. He said the back-end systems are “forward-looking and very different from a traditional operator.” On Open RAN, Bye indicated that he was pretty thrilled about working in a software-focused network where feature development could happen so much faster than in the old days with a network based on proprietary hardware. He considered the cost savings of Open RAN as only part of the equation of reducing network costs, “because the power benefit isn’t just the power on the radio, it is the ability to get the total cost down across the entire system that is important.” Dish has pledged to cover 20 percent of the US population with 5G by June 2022 and 70 percent by 2023. Bye stated that the network is well on track to meet these goals, and that nationwide construction is underway.