from the one-big-giant-head-fake dept
Back in 2019, the Trump DOJ and FCC cobbled together a dumb plan to try and hide the problems created by their rubber stamping of the competition-eroding T-Mobile and Sprint merger: they’d pretend they were helping satellite TV company Dish Network create a new 5G wireless network out of vibes and twine. As we noted back in 2019, the entire gambit was doomed to failure for a long list of reasons.
Dish never had any real experience building wireless networks. The Trump administration had no real interest in fostering competition (its “antitrust enforcer” at the time used his personal phone to help the companies dodge regulatory scrutiny). Multiple companies always wanted the spectrum Dish was collecting, and nobody in wireless really wanted to have to seriously compete on price.
Dish CEO Charlie Ergen, who had long been hoarding valuable spectrum, needed to pretend to the government he was serious about using it, and not just waiting for its value to appreciate so he could cash out later. The entire plan always seemed like a decorative con.
Fast forward to 2025 and the Dish 5G network is a joke nobody really uses, and Dish owner Echostar is now preparing for bankruptcy, precisely as we predicted all along.
Elon Musk’s Starlink wants a lot of the spectrum Dish is using in the 2GHz band. Verizon and AT&T would likely enjoy owning some of Dish’s other spectrum assets. So Trump FCC boss Brendan Carr is suddenly pretending to care about holding corporations accountable, and has launched a new inquiry into whether Dish is stringing regulators along (which I’d argue the Trump FCC knew was the plan all along).
Echostar has been missing millions of dollars of interest payments on its notes. Once it’s threatened by bankruptcy, it likely will find itself in a vulnerable position with the Trump FCC:
“A looming potential bankruptcy proceeding may force EchoStar back to the negotiation table with the FCC.”
And that “negotiation” most likely ends with the FCC forcing Dish to sell its spectrum assets to Elon Musk, Verizon, and AT&T. Outlets like the Wall Street Journal will of course cover this unskeptically as if the FCC is doing a serious investigation and this is all very serious business.
But it’s all been the greasiest of cons. A half-assed network was built as cover for industry consolidation and spectrum hoarding. When it inevitably failed, it gets stripped for parts with the help of captured regulators in dutiful sway to a billionaire. Dish CEO Charlie Ergen sells his rich hoard of spectrum and heads off into retirement, while the company’s employees get shitcanned.
The wireless industry consolidates further, competition erodes, consumer prices continue to rise, and captured regulators and U.S. business leaders all ignore all of the problems they helped create, and we all forget about the half-decade-worth of fictions they leveraged to pull the wool over the press’ and public’s eyes. I’d still argue that all of this was very likely the plan from the start.
All very serious business and extremely innovative stuff in a very serious country full of savvy and very serious deal-makers.
Filed Under: competition, consolidation, elon musk, fcc, spectrum, telecom, wireless
Companies: at&t, dish, echostar, spacex, starlink, verizon
