Charlie Ergen’s Job Change Points to Dish’s Costly Network Plan
- Wall Street had long expected Dish to sell its spectrum
- ‘They still have a lot of options,’ Jefferies’s Goldman says
Charlie Ergen
Photographer: Jonathan AlcornThis article is for subscribers only.
Charlie Ergen’s relinquishment of his CEO title to focus on wireless strategy is a signal that his Dish Network Corp. is dead serious about building its own network, a plan that once seemed unlikely.
A costly construction project to create a data network from scratch was once seen as a last resort for Dish, which owns about $39 billion worth of wireless airwaves and has to use at least part of them by the Federal Communications Commission’s March 2020 deadline. Many analysts had expected Ergen to sell the spectrum, to join forces with a current wireless carrier to build a network, or to work with a “tenant” such as Amazon.com Inc. or Facebook Inc. to provide services to their customers.