Charles Ergen, chairman and co-founder of Dish Network Corp.
Jonathan Alcorn | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Dish Network shares rose as much as 12% on Wednesday, reaching prices not seen since mid-2019, after the satellite television company announced a partnership with Amazon Web Services to deploy a 5G network on the cloud provider’s infrastructure would have.
Dish is trying to become the fourth national wireless player alongside T-Mobile, Verizon and AT&T alongside video distribution. The contract with Amazon is an integral part of Dish’s plan to build a network from scratch that will deliver more efficient and reliable 5G speeds than its previous competition. It’s also important for Dish to start offering services from mid-2023. In this case, there is a risk that Dish will lose its licenses for radio frequencies if it has not yet developed a functioning radio network.
Dish will “operate the first standalone, cloud-based 5G open radio access network in the US, beginning with Las Vegas later this year,” the company said in a statement. The statement said Amazon and Dish will work together to find out how companies like Amazon and AWS are using 5G or building their own networks. The terms of the contract were not disclosed.
Dave Brown, vice president of AWS core service Elastic Compute Cloud, told CNBC’s “Tech Check” on Wednesday that the collaboration with Dish will “absolutely” serve as a kind of case study that Amazon can provide to other telecom providers to show that 5G networks are available can be implemented in clouds and not in data centers with special infrastructure.
This could help Amazon grow its own cloud business, a major revenue stream that increased sales by nearly 30% in 2020.
Microsoft, the second largest cloud infrastructure provider after Amazon, is also interested in network operators building 5G networks in its cloud. AT&T uses Microsoft’s Azure cloud. Last year Microsoft took over two companies aimed at network operators.
AWS already works with Verizon, the largest US wireless operator.
– CNBC’s Alex Sherman contributed to this report.
WATCH: Amazon Web Services, Dish works for a cloud-based 5G network
