Good day. Welcome to the DISH Network Corporation Q4 and Year-End 2020 Earnings Conference Call. Today's conference is being recorded. At this time, I'd like to turn the conference over to Tim Messner. Please go ahead, sir. Thanks, good morning, everyone. We're joined today by Charlie Ergen, our Chairman; Erik Carlson, our CEO; Paul Orban, our CFO; Tom Cullen, EVP of Corporate Development; Marc Rouanne, our Chief Network Officer; and John Swieringa, EVP and Head of our Retail Wireless business. We have some opening remarks. First, I'm going to run through our safe harbors. Statements we make during this call that are not statements of historical fact constitute forward-looking statements that are subject to risks, uncertainties and other factors that could cause our actual results to differ materially from historical results and/or forecasts. We assume no responsibility for updating forward-looking statements. For more information, please refer to the risks and other factors discussed in our SEC filings. We filed an application to potentially participate as a bidder for spectrum in FCC Auction 107. Due to the FCC's anti-collusion rules, we will not be answering any questions on that auction during today's call. That's it for me. I'd like to turn it over to our CEO, Erik Carlson. Hey, thank you, Tim, and welcome everyone. I hope you're all doing well. We appreciate you being with us today. Paul and I are gonna keep our comments brief and leave plenty of time for any questions. You know, this year's been a trying year for everyone in the face of the pandemic, and I'm proud of how the DISH team has responded and turned obstacles into opportunities. I'm also proud of how we've kept the safety of our team, our customers, and our communities we serve top of mind as we execute against our goals throughout the year. We've accomplished a lot in 2020, and we've entered the Retail Wireless business with the acquisition of Boost Mobile, and we partnered with Tucows to utilize their mobile services solutions, and we acquired the Ting Mobile subscriber base. Now, over the past six months, we've worked to implement the same discipline we have on the Pay TV side of the business to our Retail Wireless business. We've introduced new plans, offers, shed unprofitable customers, been making plans to grow the business in 2021. In addition, we made great strides on building the nation's first cloud-native Open RAN-based 5G broadband network. In 2020, we signed significant contracts with software partners, fiber providers, equipment manufacturers, and tower companies. We've charted a course for a great 2021, and we look forward to sharing updates throughout the year on progress on our network. We also had a solid year in Pay TV, despite the headwinds presented by the pandemic. This was driven by our continued discipline and better execution in both DISH TV and Sling TV. We're focused on providing products and services with the best technology, outstanding customer service, and a great value. We strive to offer our customers with a better price to value relationship than those available from other Pay TV subscription providers. Through our efforts, we were recognized by our customers for the third year in a row as being number one in customer satisfaction with J.D. Power in 2020. We reported strong revenue numbers for the year and brought in more than $3 billion in OIBDA. We increased our revenue more than $2.5 billion from 2019 and our net income by nearly $400 million. With that, I'd like to highlight a few items across several key lines of business for the fourth quarter. In the fourth quarter, we continued to advance our wireless efforts. Retail Wireless net subscribers decreased by approximately 363,000 for the fourth quarter, largely due to our ongoing efforts to integrate our Retail Wireless operations, shed unprofitable customers, and make operational changes to enhance profitability. As I mentioned last quarter, our profitability is determined in part by what we pay to access the network as an MVNO. As we roll out our own network, we'll begin to benefit from owner economics. That's going to drive profitability and allow us to be more disruptive and drive better competition in the Retail Wireless space. In addition, we made great strides in Q4 with our wireless network efforts. Since our last call, we've enlisted fiber providers, like Everstream, Zayo, Crown, Segra, and Uniti for fronthaul and backhaul network support. We reached an agreement with Crown Castle for wireless towers, and just last month we signed a similar agreement with Vertical Bridge. We've announced an agreement with Aviat for 5G microwave transport services and signed a deal with Mavenir for cloud-based messaging and Qualcomm to utilize their 5G RAN platforms. We've also completed our first 5G validation in December. 2021 is gonna be a landmark year for us in wireless, and Charlie, Tom, and Marc are here with us today and are available to talk more in depth about our wireless progress in a few minutes. With regard to the quarter, DISH TV performed well given the current environment with gross activations of nearly 235,000. We're down year-over-year primarily due to COVID and our approach to it. As I stated before, the crisis has impacted our customers' willingness to respond to some marketing tactics, like opening direct mail or event-based sales, and in some cases, allowing technicians to perform services in their home. We've reduced our marketing expenditures and our gross new TV subscribers have decreased. Our DISH TV strategy has been anchored in acquiring and retaining long-term profitable customers. We've been focused on a more rural and higher credit quality customer base, and we remain committed to that path. In the quarter, we saw DISH TV net subscriber loss of 149,000. Our losses are primarily the result of a lower gross new DISH TV subscriber activations, partially offset by lower DISH TV churn rate. Paul's gonna have a few, a bit more detail on that in a moment. Turning to Sling TV. In the quarter, we gained approximately 16,000 subscribers, and while we still have considerable room to grow, we're encouraged that we added subs in the back half of the year compared to the first half of the year. This was primarily due to the return of sports, and it was also helped by the improvements we made to the platform. We launched Sling Watch Party to enhance the collaborative viewing experience, added new programming like the Big Ten, and increased our on-demand library to over 150,000 titles. Most recently, we added 50 hours of free DVR storage. With that said, we continue to focus on acquiring and retaining profitable customers and delivering a great experience for both DISH TV and Sling TV. 2021's gonna be an exciting and transformative year on many fronts. We've got a lot of work to do, but we've got the focus and resolve to realize our vision. With that, I'm gonna turn it over to Paul for a little commentary on the numbers. Thank you, Erik. I have some brief remarks on the quarter before we open it up for questions. As a reminder, we made changes to our financial reporting in the third quarter. We now disclose operating results for both our Pay TV and wireless segments. In addition, we report results for our two wireless business units, Retail Wireless and 5G Network Deployment. Since we now report segment operating results, we are disclosing segment OIBDA as a measure of profitability for each segment. Erik addressed the overall subscriber trends, but I'll add a little color on our commercial subscribers for DISH TV. The COVID pandemic had significantly impacted our commercial subscribers. As discussed in previous quarters, 250,000 of these accounts were put on pause and/or received temporary rate relief. They were removed from our Q1 ending DISH TV subscriber count. During 2020, 80,000 of those subscribers restored service or had temporary rate relief end. These subscribers came back with minimal or no cost and were added to our ending subscriber count without being counted as a gross activation. Of the remaining commercial accounts, 69,000 of these accounts disconnected during the year. We're hopeful the remaining 100,000 commercial accounts will restore service in the coming quarters. We cannot be certain of this. Companies in the hospitality and the airline industries continue to evaluate the amenities provided to their customers, that includes Pay TV. Turning to the financials. In the fourth quarter compared to last year, our consolidated revenue and OIBDA are both up significantly. Revenue increased due to the Boost acquisition. The OIBDA increase was driven by Pay TV generating over $1 billion and Retail Wireless generated $188 million during the quarter. Let's dig into the details of each segment. Our Pay TV revenue in the fourth quarter increased due to higher ARPU, partially offset by a lower subscriber base. The increase in Pay TV ARPU was mainly driven by price increases for both DISH and Sling. Our subscriber margins for the quarter were positively impacted by the ARPU increases just discussed and our cost-cutting initiatives related to COVID. SG&A expenses for the fourth quarter decreased compared to last year as a result of fewer subscriber additions and our cost-cutting initiatives related to COVID. We settled our telemarketing litigation for $210 million, which was $70 million less than what we had accrued, benefiting SG&A expenses in the quarter. DISH TV SAC per activation decreased slightly from $850 last year to $842, largely due to lower equipment costs per activation. Let's turn to our Retail Wireless business unit. Service revenue was almost $1.1 billion, down slightly from Q3, and OIBDA was $188 million for the quarter. Consistent with DISH and Sling, we are focusing on acquiring long-term, profitable Retail Wireless subscribers. We are currently in the process of making changes to our marketing, sales, and operations to further enhance our profitability given our MVNO economics. Lastly, let's look at our 5G Network Deployment group. We invested over $50 million in OpEx and CapEx during the fourth quarter. We expect CapEx to increase substantially throughout 2021 as we ramp up our 5G Network Deployment. During Q4, we generated $357 million of free cash flow and made the final payment of $730 million to the FCC for our licenses acquired in Auction 105. Finally, in December, we issued $2 billion of our 0% convertible notes due in 2025. We ended the quarter with approximately $3.7 billion of cash and marketable securities. With that, I'm gonna turn it over to Charlie for some comments. Good morning, everyone. Normally, I don't make comments, and I'm certainly not one to look in the rearview mirror, but I did wanna point out something that I think, you know, sometimes gets lost in, in when you analyze DISH. Obviously, we don't talk a lot, you know, we don't go to a lot of conferences and we remain focused on really building our business. 2020 was a, was a transition year for us. It's a very successful transition year for us. It's, it's the third time that we've had a transition in my 40 years in business. I've always felt that the transition year, the transition time is always the toughest. If you can get through the transition, then you can really grow your business in a dramatic way. You know, in 1980, when we started the business, the transition really was to survive. Most companies go out of business, probably 90% of companies go out of business because they just don't have a good idea and run out of funds. For us, it took us about three years to make the transition from a retail company to a distribution company and actually get past the survival stage. Second transition was when it took us over a decade, which is we realized that there was a technology, experimental technology called DBS, and we were in the big dish business, and that was gonna transform big dishes into little dishes. In 1995, with the launch of our first satellite, that year was a transition year for us because we had put all the pieces in place with spectrum, satellite construction, launch, and digital technology to go compete with the cable industry. 2020 was over a decade-long transition of accumulating spectrum, and getting critical mass with spectrum, to go and compete in the wireless world. We finalized our long-term executive team, which took years to do. We were able to enter the retail market in wireless in an unexpected way with the acquisition of Boost and a 7-year MVNO term with T-Mobile, who's quietly or not so quietly building the, probably the finest network in the United States. We purchased 14 MHz of low-band spectrum in 800. We purchased approximately 20 MHz of CBRS spectrum nationwide, the only nationwide provider, and around 600 MHz of millimeter wave all last year. We solidified key vendor relationships and have a number of companies that are helping us on our quest to build the world's best network. And we have over $4 billion of cash on our balance sheet. That all leads to the fact that as we enter 2021, we have everything that we need to build this one-of-a-kind 5G network. Now for us, it's execution. Once you get through the transition stage, you have to focus on it's all about execution. There are certainly significant risks for us as we go execute. We have to deploy our network, and then we've got to put it all together to work, to make it work. There certainly will be substantial risk. There certainly will be lots of problems, but we have the team and the focus to overcome that. Our company has always been a company that can execute. I have a degree of confidence that we're gonna execute in 2021. That means that we're gonna build our first major city by the end of the third quarter and more to come. We're gonna round out our team, the really great engineers, wireless engineers, where they wanna come work for this company because we're building something special. We're gonna continue with rounding out our vendor partners and making sure that we still have cloud, we still have transport, we still have orchestration, just to name a few. We'll continue to do that. At the end of the day, you know, we're gonna have this really special 5G cloud-native, Open RAN virtualized network that really doesn't exist in the world today. It's not our first rodeo. It's very similar to building a digital video when the world was analog. Wireless networks really haven't been upgraded from an architecture point of view in the last 30 years. You know, we're confident that with our focus, we'll actually help the United States actually start leading again in wireless. Most of our partners are American companies with American ingenuity and there's no reason that America can't lead. As an example, nobody has better cloud companies than the United States. Nobody has a better, when you virtualize a network, in other words, you do it with software, not hardware. Nobody has better software than the United States. This is a company that has the two main operating systems in the world today in Apple's iOS and Google's Android in the handset side. There's no reason that this country can't lead, and there's no reason that DISH isn't gonna be a part of that and probably will be out front in some of those things. The reason the transition is important is in 1995, when we went to the little DISH business, we had two other competitors. We had a cable company, and we had DirecTV. Today, we have over 20 competitors in that very same business. In fact, we compete with our very own suppliers. That market is very competitive. You've obviously seen the trends in our industry the last four or five years. We expect that those trends will probably continue. The world's becoming an a la carte world with vendors going directly to their customers. In the wireless world, we're one of four competitors. There's three $200 billion companies that are out there, and we're entering their business with a better network to go compete. It's not just about competition for consumers or handsets. It's about what a 5G network can do, which includes a lot more than just consumers. With that, we'll open it up for questions. Thank you. If you'd like to ask a question, please signal by pressing star one on your telephone keypad. If you're using a speakerphone, please make sure your mute function is turned off to allow your signal to reach our equipment. We will be taking questions from analysts first and then questions from the media. Again, press star one to ask a question. We'll pause for just a moment. All right, I'll take our first question from Michael Rollins at Citi. Please go ahead. Thanks. Good morning. Couple questions. First, on the 5G side, I was curious if you could just provide some additional context on how you're seeing the emerging addressable market in dollars for the business side of what you're focused on versus the consumer wholesale side for the wireless business plan. Secondly, on the Sling business, with the cord-cutting trends in the industry, are you surprised not to see Sling grab more share of that video distribution market? Is there something that's, you know, holding it back that could be unleashed over the next 12 months? Thanks. Why don't you start with Sling? Thanks, Charlie. Michael, this is Erik. I'll start with the Sling question, and then I'll turn it over to the team for the 5G question. You know, look, cord-cutting has accelerated. Charlie mentioned it in his opening comments. I mean, we are now competing with some of our, you know, largest partners on the distribution side. We feel like Sling is well-positioned, not only from a value perspective, in maintaining kind of that lowest price point. Also, from delivering a good customer experience and technology. Now we have work to do on the latter two, which we've made good progress on at the end of last year, and we'll continue to make progress on this year. Sling is in a unique position, based on our packages and services that we provide in order to be a very complementary service to some of the, you know, your larger SVOD services, whether it be a Disney, Netflix, Peacock, et cetera. You know, I think that obviously we have work to do on the Sling side. I think customers, as Charlie mentioned, you know, there is a bit of an a la carte world happening. I think there'll be some aggregation back, but we're well positioned to fulfill the unique proposition of providing a kind of a bundle of cable nets with, you know, quality SVOD services from some of the competitors out there. I think the other thing that we do very well is we're giving customers choice, right? You know, choice in how they, how they acquire the content that is important to them, most uniquely on the locals front, right. You know, if you look at, you know, expenses, retrans is obviously one of the expenses that's going up at the highest rate, those local channels. Sling TV is well positioned to provide services, whether it be an off-air antenna that's integrated to, you know, one of our, one of our set-top boxes, or a service like Locast or a service like, you know, CBS All Access, which will now become Paramount+. You know, our strategy there is to really partner and become complementary. With that, I think we can continue to make progress on the acquisition front. This is Charlie. I'll answer the second part of your question. One comment on Sling. I actually agree a little bit with the premise. We should have more market share there. We really were first to market. We stumbled a little bit with just the quality of the user interface, user experience and technically, Our network was the best at first, but we got maybe got a little complacent, and it's taken a while to upgrade it. That's all being done the first half of this year, so, you know, we'll see how it goes. We have room to improve there, that's for sure. We should have gotten more market share. On the business side, we don't have a dollar amount to give you today on where the business. Our network is designed. Let's talk about the three things that we do different from current networks. First of all, our network will be an O-RAN network. It means that we separate the baseband and the radio. It gives us a lot more flexibility in terms of mixing and matching off-the-shelf parts and radios and lower cost and more flexibility, more American content and vendors and not one company that controls this end- to- end like current networks have. We're virtual. We're more virtual. We do a lot more with software than hardware, so it means a lot of big boxes that use a lot of power, those things become software. We're cloud-native, which means our network runs in the cloud. Why is that important? That's important because we can use modern techniques like machine learning and artificial intelligence, so that we can actually analyze our network real time. We can make our network better. We can also opens up our ability on an automated basis to what we call slice our networks, that we can open up our network to private networks and companies and what we call enterprise business, so they can have what looks like their own network. They control their own network, and they get access to the data in the cloud where they can actually use that data to make a better product, a less expensive product, and a safer product. It also marries obviously with private clouds should they so choose to do that. We're changing. I think a lot of analysts look at how many handsets you're gonna have, what's your market share gonna be in handsets and so forth and so on. Your question is well taken in the sense that a part of our business will be the enterprise business that is a fairly nascent business today, and we'll be on the leading edge of that as it grows. Thank you. All right. We'll now take our next question from John Hodulik at UBS. Please go ahead. Great. Thanks. Again, maybe for Charlie, just any milestones or metrics that investors should look at this year as evidence that the strategy's on plan? Maybe along with that, how many cities are you targeting at this point for O-RAN? Lastly, just one follow-up. You guys executed a transaction in the fourth quarter for about $300 million. It looks like to buy into Designated E ntities. Just the thought process or the driver behind that transaction would be great. Thanks. You want to take the second part. On the DEs? DE thing. Yeah. John, this is Tom. Yeah, we did a transaction in the fourth quarter with one of the DEs, where we just bought down their position, and it was a transaction that both parties were interested in executing. There's not much more to it than that. Yeah. They had a put right to do that. Okay. Got it. That's a bit out of our control. Yeah. Then the second. Yeah. Yeah. What was the first part of the question? Just the milestones and- Yeah, milestones. Just like, I think obviously we have lots of metrics and milestones internally, and we're not gonna go through each and every one of those because it's just a bit complicated, and obviously our focus is on actually doing that. The big milestone for people is probably gonna be our first major city that's up and operational. That's where we'll find out. My experience has been, as we open up our first city, we'll have problems 'cause, you know, we'll drop a call, something's gonna go wrong that we didn't expect. That's where we find out how our team and our vendors work together to solve those problems. By the end of the third quarter, you'll see that. You'll see the first major city. We'll have other cities. I don't have a number for you year end, but we'll be doing every month after the third quarter, we'll be doing multiple cities, focused on a June of 2022 metric of 20% of the population of the United States to meet our first FCC milestone. By the end of the third quarter, you'll be able to take a phone and see whether we work or not and see all the problems and we'll have them for sure, and then see if we can fix them. Then you'll have a feel for how good we are at execution and how good our architecture is and how good our network is going to be. Realize, we're not going to be running in the first city, we'll be crawling. Hopefully we'll get up and be walking by the end of the year. You know, John, as Dave mentioned on the last call, you know, he has built out a distributed deployment team in many markets around the country. The RF planning is completed, we now have permitting and zoning activity underway in dozens of markets around the country. The activity level is very high. We're not at a position right now to forecast the final number of markets by the end of this year, we clearly, as Charlie said, we're focused not only on the June 2022, 20% milestone, we're really vectoring towards the 70% milestone in June 2023. John, our long pole of the tent is radios, right? We could have done like everybody else has done. We could have built a network that was never gonna compete with the Chinese, was never gonna be up to the standards of Huawei. We chose to we said, "What's the next generation? What's the next generation of networks?" That's where you go to Open RAN. When we went to Open RAN, there just weren't any non-Chinese current providers that were ready to go, and it took us, it took us an extra year to get Fujitsu and MTI and now some others to help us with O-RAN radios and architecture. That's the long pole of the tent. Those radios start coming in the second quarter, and then as soon as we get them in, we'll start deploying them. Okay. Thanks, guys. All right, I'm gonna take our next question from Craig Moffett at MoffettNathanson. Please go ahead. Hi. Charlie, two questions, if I could. First, you've talked a lot about adding a strategic partner. Can you just first update us on that, and perhaps tell us your thinking of when's the ideal time to add that partner? Is it before you've done any of your test markets? Would you rather have a test market in advance? Related to that, you did a convertible security in December. It wasn't a huge number relative to the overall financing, but I wonder if you could just talk about your thought process of why you decided to go with a convertible rather than debt and whether we should read anything into that for future financing decisions. Yeah. I think on strategic partner, Craig, we look at it maybe a little bit different than the Street does. For us, strategic partners are our strategic relations. We already have the major strategic, whether it be VMware or Mavenir, Altiostar, Crown, and SBA, Vertical Bridge, and other tower companies, and more to come. What we do there is...and we're a pretty big R&D project, and all those companies are helping us. They're spending capital that they're not getting a, the immediate return on in terms of that. Like in the cloud, we've got several companies that have been helping us with cloud. Wireless is the next big growth, telco's the next big growth for cloud. In fact, it's probably their biggest growth of the next decade. That's probably their biggest growth. Yet it's a little bit different than the normal data that they've been doing today. There's some things that we have to invent together and change in what they're doing. The way we look at strategic partnerships, there's money aside, is how do we make their company better, and how do they make our company better? Everybody we're working with, that's our goal is we're their champions to go help make their companies better, whether it be providing resources or test beds or testing on our network. They're spending a lot of resources to help make us better. From a financing point of view, the convert security, we, you know, we just felt like putting capital on the balance sheet to get us to 2023, where I think, you know, there's always a chance more than zero, Craig, that we're out of business, or we don't know what the heck we're doing and we fail. I think the, you know, the rational bet is that we know what we're doing and that we have a team and partners to help us. We're gonna get there. Then obviously the world looks at us a little bit differently. You know, you're probably one of our biggest skeptics, and it's our job to, you know, your stuff is well taken. I read your stuff. I think you're a great writer, and I think you make great points. Not one of your points, not one ever, has been something that we haven't thought about here, and that we don't at least believe we have a strategic solution to it. Therefore, I think that our job is to go out and produce this, is to go out and execute and build this network. Then obviously, internally, we talk about, we just prove our skeptics wrong. We don't spend a lot of time talking external about what we're doing. We just stay focused on what we're doing. Good teams and good companies that do things, they focus. You know, we focus probably to our detriment, where we don't explain what we're doing to everybody every day. We're gonna show you. That's why I think John's question, I think earlier, when we can see something in the third quarter, I think will be important. Then there's, you know, so the ideal time is when you can show people what you're doing, if you believe in what you're doing. I take that means that ideally you wanna before you would think about a major strategic partner in the sense that you've talked about them in the past rather than vendors, you would wait until after you have a sort of showcase set of test markets. Is that the way I should read that? Well, I don't think you should read. I think we always thought we might need a strategic partner when we didn't have any capital. We had a lot of debt maturities. I think the same thing happened to us in DBS. We always wanted a partner in DBS. We wanted somebody to help us build satellites. What happened was, ultimately, we just got good enough, we just got confident enough and good enough with what we were doing that it just made sense to keep the equity. It didn't make sense to give up the equity. I, you know, I think we're probably in a similar situation today in the sense that we do have enough capital to build on our balance sheet today to build our network to the point where people can see whether Open RAN cloud-native networks work. I know not everybody in this call sees it, but we see it every day. The number of resumes and the quality of people that are applying to come work with us is exponentially higher than it was last year. The number of vendors that are putting resources towards us is vastly different than it was last year. The whisper confidence level for people in the know is vastly higher. You know, nobody's built a 5G Open RAN cloud-native network before. We're fortunate that Jio took a first step and Rakuten took a second step, but we're gonna be the first network that does it and completely. I don't think that there certainly always will be skepticism, but that's every time we hit a milestone internally with our partners, it goes down. You saw it with Qualcomm, and they put one of our frequencies in their chips. They don't do that for. That cost them money. That cost them R&D. It cost them space. It cost them antennas. It cost them the radio. They don't do that for companies that aren't gonna make it. That's really helpful. Thank you, Charlie. All right, we'll now take our next question from Philip Cusick at JPMorgan. Please go ahead. Hi. Thanks, guys. Charlie, maybe following up on the O-RAN side, how's it gone in terms of integrating those network vendors? Where are you versus what you expected a year ago with those sort of vendor integrations? Second, Paul, regarding the fourth quarter financials, can you talk about any one-timers here? Last quarter, I remember you had some programming credits. Were any repeated this time? Is it right that the $70 million benefit versus reaccrual on the telemarketing fine hit the G&A line? Thank you. I'll take that, the last part of that question. As it relates to one-timers, the only one-timer that we had hit in the P&L was the $70 million coming back from the FTC case, and it did hit SG&A. Thanks, Paul. Yeah, this is Marc, everyone. I'll take the one on O-RAN. I would say that we're now moving into the second phase of our O-RAN journey. That is, we're starting to build. We have tested a lot of vendors. We've brought radios, compute software together. Now, what we're doing is that we are transferring this knowledge to our teams in the field in order to build it across the U.S. That's really where we are. In terms of testing integration, you know, for me, this has been a normal journey like I've seen in the past for other technologies. This is We're coming at a time when there is maturity in the O-RAN industry for us. You know, we're just deploying it now. Thanks, Marc. All right, we'll now take our next question from Walter Piecyk at LightShed. Please go ahead. Thanks. Charlie, the first market that's getting launched in the third quarter, can you just give us a little bit more color in terms of is this like are you gonna sell to consumer wireless? Is this kind of a profile of what you can do with network sharing for potential strategic partners, investors, whoever to look at? Just a little bit more color on that first market. Thanks. Yeah. Well, first of all, it'll, you know, it'll be an NFL city. It'll be a large market. We certainly hope to have handsets for consumers, although, you know, it's gonna be a beta test, you know, for lack of a better word. You know, even Jio in India, you know, took them six months to let people try it. I just don't know what kind of problems we're gonna have. I just know we're gonna have problems, and certain things aren't gonna work. It's also the, our integration with T-Mobile and our core and getting the handoffs right, and it's not. It's a big test bed that I think is gonna work kinda day one. I'm hoping by, you know, that's why I say we'll be crawling, and then I think that as you work those bugs and kinks out in a major market, it's cookie cutter after that. What do you hope to highlight the most? How the network works into the core or how the RF works in terms of, hey, we can build a network where a phone will work if you drive around? I think the first part is blocking and tackling. The foundation is what can we do compared to, you know, what other people do? Although we won't have as much I mean, we'll be a 100% 5G network, that'll be completely different than other people. We certainly speeds are important, but certainly that is, you know, not everybody doesn't need a car that Lamborghini that goes 280 mph, I think as long as we make something that goes 100 mph, we'll be in pretty good shape. I think we'll look at consistency. We'll look at where all the problems are. Where, you know, where are our dead spots? Where did we go wrong in our RF plan? Where does our Open RAN have issues? How are we able to analyze that, and how are we able to self-heal and self-correct? You know, it's just all those issues. My experience in DBS was, I remember when we launched, our pay-per-view didn't work. Then as we started getting customers and being more successful than we thought initially, suddenly we couldn't actually provision people fast enough. We didn't have enough compute power to do it. Once we learned all those things, and it took us, you know, three or four months to kind of get the right things in place, then it was clear sailing. We still had problems, but they were kinda one-off, one at a time. My expectation is that we'll, you know, I think everybody on this call will have a pretty good idea where DISH stands by the end of the year and, you know, some people are gonna say, you know, we're, you know, we bit off more than we can chew, and some people are gonna say, "Well, we always knew they could do it." You know, but we're good at execution. It, you know, transition's tough. Execution is hard work, but there are no law of physics, Walt, and this is important, there are no law of physics to stop us from what we're doing. There is nothing that has to be invented to stop us from what we're doing. People know how to climb towers. We'll be getting radios in. People know how to build radios. People now know how to build broadband DU, DUs. Cloud exists. We don't have to invent the cloud. Handsets exist. We just have to execute. You know, right now we're, you know, it's right to be skeptical about our execution because we gotta prove it. This team, we have a team that can do it, and it's just For me, it's a pleasure to get from the transition stage to the execution stage because it's just hard work. You know, we never knew 10 years. I'm looking at Tom here, but, you know, 10 years ago, you know, we knew we had to get 100 MHz of spectrum. We, you know, we got 40 MHz of spectrum. We said, We just never knew if we'd get there or not. Now we've got, you know, well over that. You know, the... Well I can't talk about the C-band auction. I think that the, that's a whole another dynamic and a whole another strategy, counter-strategy kind of thing that you guys will be writing on in the next, the rest of the year. Think of all the analyst days you get to go to and hear everybody's story. We're gonna show you- I can't wait. We're going to show you our story. Can- We're gonna show you our story. Charlie, can you talk a little bit about Boost Mobile as well? I mean, you took this thing on. The margins I think in the quarter were 15%, which is higher than the typical MVNO margin. Is that sustainable? Is it balanced with just continual sub-losses? You also brought on Stephen Stokols to run it. I think historically, he's been very good at developing e-commerce channels. I'm curious, like, is there a plan to try and broaden the distribution and maybe reverse some of the sub-losses there while maintaining margins with some type of e-commerce type strategy? The first answer to that, maybe John will wanna. The first is bad news for Boost, because I think we've, and Craig, to his credit, pointed this out in his today, when I talked about the biggest negative kind of risk factor there is. See a new one. Yeah, of course. Hi, it's John. We're two quarters in. I think we talked about on the last call that we've had a lot of operational improvements to make, converting to the MVNO economics. We're certainly working with our distribution. We are focused on building new, more profitable acquisition channels. You'll see us, you know, work to make changes there as we move forward. You know, we are working through some very big technology and operational projects with the Boost business. One to point out, which is new news this quarter, is that we have received notice from T-Mobile that the voice CDMA network will be discontinued on or around January 1st, 2022. The majority of our Retail Wireless subscribers, receiving services from that network, we're hard at work on planning a big migration. We can't be certain that the network will actually shut down on that timeline, we have to plan and act as if it will, which will be costly for us. As Charlie mentioned earlier, we're focused heavily on building devices with our partners that'll work on our future network. We've got some timing and other considerations there that we've gotta work through. Yeah. Go ahead. Yeah, no, I was gonna say, you know, Boost is. I don't think that this quarter that these kind of margins are probably sustainable, to extent that, in fact, it might not be very good at all in the sense that we look at it from a profit and loss. The Boost customers are some of the most economically challenged customers out there that the Boost pays attention to them, and they're good customers for Boost, but they're economically challenged. It's hard to upgrade to go from a phone that works, that works great and works in their territory, works great, and then go to another phone that won't even work on our network because we're 5G. We'd have to upgrade them again. You run the numbers on that, and there would be significant fallout from that, in my opinion. The second thing is, I don't even think we could get the supply of the phones that we would need. You can't order phones and not know that you can move the phones, and the supply is somewhat limited for the kind of phones we might need for that. That's a material risk that's out there on Boost. I think the positive side is the team, the Boost team, John leading the team, showed they can execute. They showed that they, in a very short period of time, could turn around some past practices from Boost that weren't economical. Maybe we were to show Wall Street some numbers. We're not into that game here. We're into actually managing, you know, your capital and our capital in an efficient manner. They've shown that they can turn that around in very short order. I set a goal for them to be profitable by the end of the year. They were profitable the first quarter, and they became more profitable the second quarter. We got a management team that can execute, and they're on pins and needles and edge of their seat to get our first market on our network, where we can control our own destiny. Okay, thanks. All right. Well, I'll take our next question from Jonathan Chaplin at New Street Research. Please go ahead. Thanks, Charlie. It seems like the last big vendor, sort of category of vendors to slot in for the network is a cloud partner. I'm wondering if you could sort of talk through the merits of one cloud partner versus another, whether it would be a single cloud provider that you would partner with, or whether it could be non-exclusive, you could partner with multiple. I'm wondering if that's a relationship that you'll be able to leverage to sell into enterprises, given the given that so much of the opportunity in 5G seems to be in the private network, enterprise private network space, whether you'll be able to leverage the relationships with a cloud partner who already has strong relationships in enterprise to get into that business. Yeah. I'll let Marc, I'll make just an opening comment, and I'll turn this question over to Marc. The challenge I've given with every vendor to our team and to Marc is that our cloud provider has to first and foremost be best in class technically. We're fortunate that there are several vendors that actually can live up to that. And there's just great cloud technology in the United States and it's a whole new way of running the network. Maybe I'll let you. Yeah. You know, talk about how that affects enterprise and. First of all, you know, we've seen a very strong progress from our cloud choices. I mean, several different choices in the U.S. Charlie was saying that telco is a bit different in the cloud, and now we have the confidence that the cloud partners in the U.S. have the tech-telco technology that we need. That's, that's a big thing for us. We feel very good about that. When it comes to our software, you remember that the first choice we made was to select VMware. The reason was that we wanted to control the software that we use. VMware has given us, over the last 15 months, has given us this capability to move our software between clouds, but also from the top of the cloud to the edge. No other network or no other architecture has that capability in the world yet. For us, that was very important because when you discuss private networks, different customers want different setups. Some want to have a certain type of cloud. Some want to have their private cloud. Some want to put the software on their premise, on their factory or on their campus. For us, it has to be automated. We spend a lot of time with our cloud partners to be able to do that seamlessly. L ike I said, for the O-RAN, we are now in the deployment mode, where we have the capability with VMware and with some cloud partners to move the software east, west, and north, south. Jonathan, this is Tom. Most of the focus has been with Marc's team working on the technical architecture, but we clearly expect a cloud partner to bring a go-to-market component to the relationship. Wonderful. Thanks. Great. We'll now take our next question from Kutgun Maral at RBC. Please go ahead. Thanks for taking the question. Charlie, you talk about transitions, and I know the focus is on wireless, but maybe thinking through the transition across Pay TV, effectively all your content partners have launched their own direct-to-consumer services. This isn't new, but I'm curious if the tenor of your discussions during the current negotiations is changing. If so, is it more about fine-tuning pricing and packaging terms with programmers, or do you expect to take an even harder line with ultimately, I guess, who you're distributing? If I could have a brief follow-up. Yeah, I don't know that it's a harder line. I think that what we value programming as to how many people watch it, so for lack of a better word, cost per viewing hour, and what are the alternatives to get it. Obviously, to the extent that we had football exclusively with NFL Sunday Ticket, you know, that was an exclusive, that has value. To the extent that you can watch it in 10 different places, it has one-tenth the value, right? When we have a content negotiation and that content is available through other means, it's just less valuable to us. The content providers are strategically, I think in their strategic rooms, they're saying, "How do we keep these linear guys paying as much money as possible for as long as possible while we go direct to the consumer and cut them out?" You know, oh, by the way, we're making these guys bundle every channel, and we'll go to the consumer and give them a lot more flexibility and be a la carte. Obviously, that's gonna be a tough business model going forward. We're unique in that Erik may speak to this, we've looked at viewing as an experience, and we've done a lot of different things to make the experience on DISH Network better than the experience might be in one of these, on one of these vendors. We go after people that, you know, are more rural and so forth and so on. Look. All I can say is I'm sleeping at night. You know, I'm sleeping at night now because, you know, I've been through this before. We knew the big DISH business was gonna be a business that would be challenged, you know, four years before anybody ever wrote the first word about it. We knew that this model would be challenged in video. I think we talked about it on a conference call, probably, you go back and look at the records, probably seven or eight years ago, when everybody kind of laughed at us and said, "Why aren't you spending more money to get these customers?" You know, we've made that transition that, you know, it's a mature declining business, and it's a solid business. The cash flows are good. It's not going away, it's gonna decline. I would expect our cost of programming wouldn't go up as much, you know, based on customers going direct. We probably will lose some of our customers. You know, some of our programming partners we may lose as a result of that. You know, Erik and his team are running it, running it as a business. We have great relationships with our consumers. We found that out with HBO. HBO didn't renew. They wanted minimum guarantees from us and high prices that made no sense for us to pay. Obviously, we're a competitor, so and they had Game of Thrones coming up, final season of Game of Thrones. We didn't lose many customers, let me put it that way, because our relationship was strong. They watched Showtime and Starz and other things, Netflix, and, you know. HBO lost a revenue stream. Do you want to jump in on that? No, I'm fine. I think you handled it. All right. Operator, I think we have time for one more before. Okay. Sorry? This is Jon Atkin. Hello? I've got a follow-up question from Kutgun. Jon Atkin with RBC. On the 5G, I wanted to basically drill down a little bit on the tower MLA that you referenced on the fiber partnerships. You know, what type of run rates are you targeting, you know, per month or per quarter in terms of getting the equipment deployed? Is the gating factor the delivery of the radios, or is it more about the permitting and the entitlement? What kind of pace can we start to look forward to through the end of the year? Yeah, I think the gating item's gonna be radios. The threat, I'd say, it's the supply chain. It's supply chains management. In terms of the number of markets that you're going after besides the NFL cities to get to that 20% target and beyond, you do obviously need to redeploy the hardware, pre-deploy the hardware on the network. What kind of a cadence are we looking at given that you already have a lot of MOAs in place and the fiber agreements in place? The cadence will be to get us to 20% in June. That's 60, I don't know what the exact number of POPs that is, but it's probably 60 million POPs- 65 million POPs. We mentioned it earlier on the call, but the activity is underway in dozens of markets. The target is really focused on the 70% build-out by June of 2023. The requirement is for 15,000 towers minimum. As I said on the last quarterly call, I think it'll be north of 15,000 by that timeframe. Yeah, Mayo's and in our daily staff meetings, Mayo's yelling at, is always saying, "I'm ready whenever you're ready." He's looking at Marc and Stephen and Tom and, at me and says, "I'm ready whenever you guys are. We're gonna have radios." You know, we have a schedule for radios and, you know, so I hesitate to give you that cadence because with COVID and supply chain and everything else, you know, we've already had, you know, some delays in that. You know, we're pretty confident, but until the factory production is spitting it out, and we get to see with our own eyes, you know, we'll see. Okay. The cadence looks pretty good. Operator, we have time for one more from the analyst community, and then we'll have time for a couple from the media. All right. We'll now take our final question from the analyst community. Members of the media on the call, please press star one now to enter the queue to ask a question. Once again, that's star one. We will begin the media portion of this call following the answer to this final analyst question. Our final analyst comes from Douglas Mitchelson at Credit Suisse. Please go ahead. Thanks for squeezing me in. Just a couple, you guys have already covered a lot. Tom, when you say a cloud provider should bring go-to-market component to the relationship, just, you know, interested in what you mean by go-to-market component. I think, you know, at jump ball, are you guys wanting to give us a sense? I understand, Charlie, your comments that, you know, you can fully fund the network build out at this point based on cash flow and cash on hand, but just curious if you're willing to say what the 2021 spending on deploying the network would be. Lastly, sort of just, you know, not sure if there's much more fishing I can do here, Charlie, but just adding on to Craig's question, I think I was pretty surprised by you using equity. You certainly have a pretty long history of avoiding equity. I assume you expect a lot of value creation if you execute here. Yes, the last couple years you mentioned there was a lot of interest in financing and helping you know, with funding the network, and shifting over to equity from that seems like a change in sort of, you know, balancing how you might finance things. Was the demand by others willing to give you money just sort of too expensive in terms of shared capacity or in terms of the rate they wanted to charge you versus equity? Any more that you could help us with understanding issuing a convert rather than issuing debt or taking an investment in would be helpful. Thanks so much. Yeah, this is Charlie. Obviously, there's a balance between how much, you know, debt and equity you have, and, you know, for the most part, we believe, you know, given where we think we're gonna go, that we're relatively debt-free on the wireless side. We thought we'd get better execution, but the market kind of threw up on it for whatever reason, and we thought we'd get a little bit better execution, so we were disappointed. On the other hand, it's not gonna be material in the scheme of things where we're going. That, you know, 0% interest for five years is, was attractive and, it, you know, again, I think we didn't quite hit our metric of where we thought we would come in pricing- wise. Had we, in hindsight, maybe known it was gonna be conversion in the $40- low $40 range, you know, I think maybe we'd have thought about it differently. You know, you win some, you lose some, and our best guess there wasn't quite as good as it should have been, I guess. You know, go back, file that one away, and now we're a little smarter. Tom, why don't you take the rest of it? Yeah, Doug, nice job getting in four questions there. Yeah, as far as the go- to-m arket, obviously the conversations with, you know, they range depending on which cloud service provider we're talking to, but they clearly all have enterprise sales channels, and they all see a movement towards distributed cloud, mobile edge computing, which brings 5G into the conversation naturally with their customer base. Beyond that, I don't wanna go into more detail. That's helpful. Spending this year? We don't give guidance on that. All right. Thank you all very much. All right, Doug. Thanks. Great. We'll now take our first question from the media from Scott Moritz at Bloomberg. Please go ahead. Great. Hey, Charlie, you spoke earlier on the call about the risks of the Boost network shutting down. Have you had a chance to talk to the FCC about this? Do you have any confidence that maybe you can get a break on the timing of that shutdown? I shouldn't tell you I haven't talked to the FCC. You know, it's possible that our staff has. You know, it's a risk that's out there and look, this administration wanted four providers. We wanted four providers. I hope you know that, you know, we'll see. We don't know what the regulatory environment. It's one of the risks that we always worry about, is that Washington picks winners and losers, and they make policy that affects people, you know, one way or the other. You know, we've had some good luck, we've had some bad luck, you know, with that as have others. You know, we'll have to see which way that goes. We'll probably tell you a little bit about which way the wind's blowing. Look, we view it as anti-competitive. I mean, it's as simple as that. Obviously, those customers, if they can't go to our. We don't have a network up yet. There's only a couple places they can go. You know, we view that as anti-competitive. Great, thanks. Do you face a risk of those customers going back to T-Mobile, and would that also be considered anti-competitive? Well, I don't know what the I can't speak to their motivations, but obviously one of the beneficiaries. What we can say is one of the beneficiaries of a premature turn off of the CDMA network would be T-Mobile. Got it. Thanks. All right. Once again, that is star one if you'd like to ask a question. We'll now take our next question from Amy Maclean at Cablefax. Please go ahead. Hi. Thanks for taking the question. I just wondered, Discovery said today that its Discovery Plus service has surpassed 11 million paid subscribers. I wondered what you thought of that service, do you foresee it changing how you deal with them as a partner? Well, I think Discovery's got great content, and we've had a long-term relationship with them, but obviously to the extent that you can get it on an à la carte basis, it'll affect future negotiations. Some of our customers don't watch Discovery. A lot of our customers don't watch Discovery. Should we burden every customer with Discovery if they can get it somewhere else? I mean, you know, it has to be a fair rate that we can burden customers who don't watch it, and you have to run that math. That's just economics. It's not rocket science. We know, you know, our customers who watch it, and how long they watch it in real time. Look, it's why I started out with, which I don't think I've done in a long time. That's why I talked about transition to start the call, because that's why it was so important for us to get in 2020 where we are. Okay, operator, I think we can take one more from the media, please. Once again, that is star one if you'd like to ask a question. We'll pause for just a moment. All right, there appears to be no further questions. I'll turn it back to the speakers. Please go ahead. Al right. Good. We'll be seeing you in probably late April or May, right? Yep. Thank you all. Appreciate it. Thanks, everyone. That concludes today's call. 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