What Dish swooping in to save T-Mobile-Sprint means for you

The fate of T-Mobile and Sprint's $26.5 billion merger may hinge on whether a federal judge sees satellite TV provider Dish Network as a viable fourth competitor in the US wireless market. But there isn't an easy answer -- especially when you balance its history of ignoring its obligations to build a wireless network with its newfound ambitions sparked by the mobile megamerger. Dish has been a major player in several past wireless auctions. And for years, the company sat on its assets without any plans for deployment. It has asked for and was granted build-out extensions from the Federal Communications Commission. Finally, the company agreed to spend $1 billion to build what it called a narrowband IoT (internet of things) network by March 2020. There has been some rumbling at the FCC and among other carriers, mainly T-Mobile, that if Dish failed to meet this deadline that it would have to give back its licenses. While the terms of the brokered DOJ deal are broadly favorable for Dish, the biggest perk for the company is that the FCC will extend Dish's build-out deadline by three years. But there's one condition: The network that Dish builds must be a commercial wireless broadband network and not one just for IoT devices.