Samsung Agrees to Supply Dish Network 5G Equipment

Samsung has inked a multi-year deal to sell equipment to Dish for its American 5G network.

As Reuters reported Tuesday (May 3), the agreement marks one of Samsung’s largest radio deals since it landed a contract with Verizon two years ago.

“This is a greater than a billion-dollar agreement for Samsung Networks,” Alok Shah, vice president at Samsung, said in an interview with Reuters. “We will be delivering our first products to Dish later this year.”

With this agreement, Samsung joins Taiwan’s Microelectronics Technology Inc and Japan’s Fujitsu in supplying 5G radios for Dish’s network.

Dish has not yet launched a commercial network, but it made a commitment to regulators it would have 20% of the U.S. population covered by next month, and at least 70% covered by the middle of next year.

“We have an objective to achieve 20% of population coverage by June and we are well on track to achieve that,” Dish Chief Commercial Officer Stephen Bye told Reuters. “We have beta users on our network for some time, testing our network … we just have not declared commercial launch and you will see that in the coming weeks.”

The company said it established network infrastructure in several cities but has been dealing with supply chain issues for the last 12-18 months. While those issues won’t go away anytime soon, Bye said Dish has the components it needs to achieve its June goal.

As PYMNTS noted last month, the push by telecom companies to get 5G phones into the hands of consumers could face another obstacle beyond supply chain issues. As our research has found, many consumers are cutting back on their spending to focus on essentials.

See also: Slow 5G Uptake Could Be Achilles Heel of Metaverse’s Retail Rollout

While the individuals that are splurging on higher-end items like electronics tend to be younger, they make up 10% of the population, meaning most people may be less inclined to upgrade and use the 5G phones — and phone plans — that underpin the shift to 5G.

Dish is also using Samsung Galaxy S22 phones to test the network and will keep using the phones throughout the network deployment.

“We are working with other device vendors and you can look at the Boost website and you will see clearly we have relationships with a lot of device vendors,” Bye said. Boost Mobile, Dish’s prepaid wireless phone brand, lists on its website phones from Samsung, Motorola and Apple.