In building and operationalizing its open, cloud-native 5G Standalone network, “Dell’s been with us from day zero”

In June 2023, DISH Wireless announced it had hit a very important goal—its 5G Standalone network, built from the ground up using Open RAN and cloud-native principles, was available to 70% of the US population, 240 million. But there’s still more to be done as the company rallies to meet the next milestone of 75% population coverage by June 2025. 

Looking back and looking ahead, DISH Wireless Vice President of Cloud Services Kevin Plunkett said the “first-of-its-kind” network, and the differentiated services it can deliver, including voice-over New Radio (VoNR) calling, was the result of developing a process wherein DISH served as the primary system integrator. “That was probably the biggest challenge and something that not a lot of other operators have ever had to do,” he told RCR Wireless News. “We had to build it all ourselves and really jump in with the partners in their own wheelhouse and say, ‘Hey, how are you developing this? What research are you working on? How do you test these products?’ And then, when it getsthe automation space, pull it all together in a fully-automated deployment.” 

Dell Technologies was one of DISH’s earliest partners, and the company’s Dell Telecom Infrastructure Blocks were a key piece. Dell’s Girish Kadam, vice president and global client executive, laid out the solution: “It’s a combination of a hardware platform, [containers-as-a-service], and automation and orchestration layer.” This helps customers to more quickly plan and deploy cloud-based, disaggregated networks because “it comes pre-validated, pre-tested, so that your day zero, day one, day two, the whole time required gets shrunk.” 

From DISH’s perspective, Plunkett explained that Dell’s approach to partnering on zero-touch infrastructure provisioning allowed them to “step away from being [primary] SI for everything, let Dell take over so that we can actually go focus our efforts on making that customer impact, that customer experience, as good as it can be.” 

Out of the blue sky,the greenfield and onto 75%

DISH Wireless has around 21,000 sites across the country that are fully deployed and in production. What this means, Plunkett said, is it’s time to stop thinking of DISH as a greenfield operator; they’ve moved from having the world’s biggest lab to “full-fledged production. We’ve got customers on this network. We are working everyday to make that customer experience even better and better.” 

As that relates to the ongoing partnership with Dell Technologies, he said, “We work with Dell on making sure that we know how to do the upgrades on their servers…all the firmware in a fully-automated way, that we know how to go from one cycle to the next with the least amount of user disruption as possible…Customers should never feel any of this impact as we continuously upgrade this network.” 

Big picture, he said: “Dell’s been with us from day zero. It’s been a great partnership and I think we’ve actually learned a lot from each other as we go and build out this new ecosystem. And it’s a fun journey.”