This post was originally published on Light Reading
Marc Rouanne took an electric scooter with a top speed of 15mph from his Austin hotel to the Big 5G Event, arriving without signs of injury or trauma. Dish Network, his employer, goes in for similarly unconventional modes of transport, running traffic over a software-based network hosted in the cloud and supported by a legion of vendors. But unlike its chief network officer on his breezy ride through the streets of Austin, Dish has been wobbling.
Its immediate target is to cover 70% of the US population – some 230 million people – with a new mobile network by June. Designed architecturally by Rouanne, this “open” radio access network (RAN) is highly unorthodox. Operators usually buy all the RAN products at one site from a single vendor, relying on customized hardware and their own premises. Dish is mingling suppliers, putting software on Intel’s general-purpose processors (GPPs) and entrusting much of its estate to the public cloud of Amazon Web Services (AWS). Building a nationwide US network from scratch would be hard enough. Dish is doing it with largely unproven methods.
Dish’s Marc Rouanne addresses Big 5G Event attendees in Austin.
(Source: JLeitner Photography)
Losses at the
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