Dish is no Rakuten, as its AWS announcement illustrates

Dish Network (Dish) made history by becoming the first nationwide mobile operator in the USA to commit to running its entire 5G network, even the virtualised elements of the RAN, on a public cloud (AWS). The agreement with Amazon was touted as proof of Dish’s radical, cloud-native approach, but a closer look suggests that its strategy is based on a potentially risky combination of ‘old telco’ thinking and poor supplier choices. Dish will initially test its latest network gamble, appropriately, in Las Vegas later this year; it now has to race against time to deploy a network on an unproven platform, while trying to clarify its business model.