Dish moves closer to gaining control of LightSquared assets

[bigsnake49]

I know that most of you could not care less about Dish, but they have been in the news lately so here it goes. The first piece of news is that the fixed broadband trials with Sprint in Corpus Christi and with Ntelos are going very well and could turn into a real business. I think Sprint needs to exploit the wealth of EBS/BRS spectrum they have in the rural and exurban areas that are not served by the wired incumbents.

 

http://www.fiercewireless.com/story/dish-execs-sprint-ntelos-fixed-td-lte-trials-could-turn-real-business/2014-11-05

 

The second piece of news is that Ergen is about to get control of Lightsquared, securing about 60% of the new company with J.P. Morgan getting 31.9%. Now, a lot of you have written Lightsquared off but I bet Charlie Ergen will do something about it. He just might sue the FCC and force them to give him compensatory spectrum or force them to force the GPS community to start putting steep filters on their receivers so that the spectrum that Lightsquared owns can be usable. I would not put it past him. He is very wily and persistent. I bet he goes after the unpaired blocks in the AWS-3 auction for the minimum. Between all of his spectrum holdings he will control quite a bit of spectrum.

 

http://www.fiercewireless.com/story/dishs-ergen-would-get-control-lightsquared-latest-restructuring-deal/2014-11-04

 

Now granted, he does not have a network yet, but I am thinking Sprint will be happy to host some of his spectrum.

 

 

[WiWavelength]

I bet he goes after the unpaired blocks in the AWS-3 auction for the minimum. Between all of his spectrum holdings he will control quite a bit of spectrum.

 

Well, that would leave Dish with a lot of unpaired, uncertainly paired, or unusable spectrum:  Lower 700 MHz E block, L-band 1500 MHz, L-band 1600 MHz, AWS-3 1700 MHz, S-band 2000 MHz, and S-band 2200 MHz.  Plus, you can basically forget about the S-band spectrum being AWS-4 and band 23 and the L-band spectrum being band 24 -- as both of those are pretty much off the table now.

 

AJ

[Deval]

Well, that would leave Dish with a lot of unpaired, uncertainly paired, or unusable spectrum:  Lower 700 MHz E block, L-band 1500 MHz, L-band 1600 MHz, AWS-3 1700 MHz, S-band 2000 MHz, and S-band 2200 MHz.  Plus, you can basically forget about the S-band spectrum being AWS-4 and band 23 and the L-band spectrum being band 24 -- as both of those are pretty much off the table now.

 

AJ

 

So what does all that spectrum do for old boy Charlie? I have to believe there is some plan for it.

[bigsnake49]

Well, that would leave Dish with a lot of unpaired, uncertainly paired, or unusable spectrum:  Lower 700 MHz E block, L-band 1500 MHz, L-band 1600 MHz, AWS-3 1700 MHz, S-band 2000 MHz, and S-band 2200 MHz.  Plus, you can basically forget about the S-band spectrum being AWS-4 and band 23 and the L-band spectrum being band 24 -- as both of those are pretty much off the table now.

 

AJ

 Well one thing they can do is to turn both the 2000-2020MHz and 2180-2200 into downlinks and use both Lightsquared's 1626.5-1660.5MHz uplink and whatever other uplink they get from the AWS-3 auction to have a 40x40+ spectrum block.

[RichardXy]

At what point does the government step in and take back that spectrum? Seems like he's spectrum squatting.

[bigsnake49]

At what point does the government step in and take back that spectrum? Seems like he's spectrum squatting.

There are deployment deadlines. I think 2016 is one of them.

[bigsnake49]

 Well one thing they can do is to turn both the 2000-2020MHz and 2180-2200 into downlinks and use both Lightsquared's 1626.5-1660.5MHz uplink and whatever other uplink they get from the AWS-3 auction to have a 40x40+ spectrum block.

OK technically 2 20x20 blocks.