Dish Network, The Trump Era ‘Fix’ For The Sprint T-Mobile Merger, Heads Into Its Final Death Spiral
from the pointless-distraction dept
Aging satellite TV provider Dish Network is supposed to be undergoing a major transformation from tired old satellite TV provider to streaming and wireless juggernaut. It was a cornerstone of a Trump administration FCC and DOJ plan to cobble together a new wireless carrier out of twine and vibes as a counter-balance to the competition-eroding T-Mobile and Sprint merger.
It’s… not going well. All of the problems critics of the T-Mobile and Sprint merger predicted (layoffs, price hikes, lest robust competition) have come true. Meanwhile Dish has been bleeding satellite TV, wireless, and streaming TV subscribers for a while (last quarter the company lost another 314,000 TV subscribers, including 249,000 satellite TV subs and 65,000 Sling TV customers).
Dish’s new 5G network has also generally been received as a sort of half-hearted joke. Dish also lost 123,000 prepaid wireless subscribers last quarter; it can’t pay its debt obligations, can’t afford to buy the spectrum it was supposed to acquire as part of the Sprint/T-Mobile merger arrangement; and expanding its half-cooked 5G network looks tenuous at best.
Last year Dish proposed merging with Echostar in a bid to distract everybody from the company’s ongoing mess. They’ve also tried to goose stock valuations by hinting at an equally doomed merger with DirecTV. But those distractions didn’t help either, and there are increasing worries among belatedly aware analysts that this all ends with bankruptcy and a pile of rubble:
“MoffettNathanson analyst Craig Moffett offered a blunt assessment of the company’s future based on Dish’s deteriorating pay-TV and mobile subscriber customer base: “Dish’s business is spiraling towards bankruptcy. Gradually, then all at once, the declines are gathering speed,” he wrote in a research note.”
From 2019 or so I noted that this whole mess was likely a doomed effort, primarily designed to provide cover for an anti-competitive, job-killing wireless merger. It always seemed likely to me that Dish (which had never built a wireless network) would string FCC regulators along for a few years before selling off its valuable spectrum assets and whatever half-assed 5G network it had managed to construct.
Despite this, trade magazines that cover the telecom industry tried desperately to pretend this was all a very serious adult venture, despite zero indication anyone involved had any idea what they were doing. And the deal rubber stamping and circular logic used to justify it ran in very stark contrast to the ongoing pretense that we supposedly care about “antitrust reform.”
Ultimately Dish will make a killing on spectrum, the FCC will fine them a relative pittance for failing to meet the flimsy build requirements affixed to the merger conditions, and Dish CEO Charlie Ergen will trot off into the sunset on a giant pile of money. Some giant player like Verizon will then swoop in to gobble up what’s left of the wreckage, and the industry will consolidate further (the whole point)
The regulatory impact of approving Sprint/T-Mobile, which consolidated the U.S. wireless market from four to three major providers (jacking up prices and killing off thousands of jobs), will be forgotten, and the regulators and officials behind the entire mess will have long ago moved on to other terrible, short-sighted ideas.
Filed Under: 5g, antitrust, competition, fcc, job cuts, john legere, regulators, telecom, wireless
Companies: dish
Comments on “Dish Network, The Trump Era ‘Fix’ For The Sprint T-Mobile Merger, Heads Into Its Final Death Spiral”
so DISH is failing and will soon disappear — that’s how market competition woks to consumers’ benefit
FCC has failed for decades but faces no competition nor any consumer/citizen choice in its actions or existence
Re:
There is a reason the FCC has been crippled. The word is Republicans.
One of many examples:
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2024/02/republicans-in-congress-try-to-kill-fccs-broadband-discrimination-rules/
Re:
My god. Did you get a lobotomy?
Dish was used to allow for less competition. It failing means consumers only got things shit on.
As for the fcc. The fuck on you on about? You vote, who you vote for picks members for the fcc. And wtf would competition do for a group enforcing rules? You want companies to have two sets of rules that both have to be followed?
Re: Re:
Who I vote for doesnt weaken the FCC.
Who you vote for is the party of destructive bigots, called Republicans.
Aren’t you late for a Klan rally?
Re: Re:
*looks at net nutrality
Oh dear, there’s at least 5 sets of rules to follow, I mean, fifty sets!
Why do you Republican traitors to America insist on making things worse for companies?
Re:
“DISH is failing and will soon disappear — that’s how market competition woks to consumers’ benefit”
Why assume the observed failures are attributable to competition?
I assume typo ‘wok’ was intended to be work. Real market competition upon an even field has been known to produce benefit for the consumer, albeit said benefit was not intended.
Re:
How would a regulatory body be competitive???
Boost Infinite at least LOOKED great
The sad part is that if it had actually worked, it would’ve been great for wireless. Boost Infinite was the Dish wireless provider, and they offer a $50 plan that uses Dish, Tmobile, and AT&T towers. And they’ve been advertising on the radio. I was all geared up to switch to it and give it a try, until I started reading the horror stories online about their terrible customer service, exacerbated by the layoffs. But for one, I really don’t understand why they called themselves Boost Infinite when they had no relationship with Boost Mobile. Seemed like it was planned to fail from the start.
Re:
I’ve experienced Boost customer service. Let me summarize, briefly, my recommendation to anyone who’s considering doing the same:
RUN.
Job
Glad I didn’t get that job offer.
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Company going out of business cuz Orange Man Bad!
Lol, you can’t parody the Left.
Re:
🤡🤡🤡🤡🤡🤡🤡
Re: Graduate-level politics lesson for matthew bennett:
People who make bad decisions… tend to get the “bad” label. Go figure. But this article didn’t give Trump a label.
Presidents who nominate bad regulators on purpose… tend to earn their administrations the “bad” label.
Re: Re:
Someday the trolls on this site will read and respond to the content of the articles. But not this day.
The merger of T-Mobile and Sprint was for one reason and one reason only – to lessen competition so that the public could be price gouged.
With Citizens United, the government has become totally corrupted.
Does this “all end with bankruptcy and a pile of rubble” or Dish making “a killing on spectrum?”
Merger perceptions
This article and all others that either criticize the merger or ask to reverse it are coming from a biased mindset that the pricing coming from Sprint was feasible as a business long term. Sprint had 1-3 years worth of working cashflow before it went belly up at the start of the merger. It’s promotional pricing was not sustainable and was the only thing attracting and keeping customers. They had 10 years of reduced or non existent maintenance on legacy structures and the entirety of the fiber business had to be sold for a dollar and a $700M contract guarantee to move the negative equity it possessed. Sprint would have been sold off for its parts and the competitive landscape would not be better than it is now. At least T-Mobile has kept it’s word on price lock for life. Look at AT&T and Verizon pricing.
Rubbish
As far as I concern this story is a bunch of bovine non-sense. Someone should go back and review the history and get their facts straight 😛