Good day, and welcome to the DISH Network Corporation Q2 2022 earnings call. Today's conference is being recorded. At this time, I would like to turn the conference over to Tim Messner. Please go ahead. All right. Thanks, Christina. Good morning, everyone. Thanks for joining us. We're joined on the call this morning by Charlie Ergen, our Chairman, Erik Carlson, our CEO, Paul Orban, our CFO, Tom Cullen, EVP of Corporate Development, Dave Mayo, EVP of Network Development, Stephen Stokols, EVP of Boost Mobile, and John Swieringa, President and COO of Wireless. Before we start, our safe harbors. During this call, we may make forward-looking statements which are subject to risks, uncertainties, and other factors that could cause our actual results to differ materially from historical results or from our forecasts. We assume no responsibility for updating forward-looking statements. For more information on factors that may affect future results, please refer to our SEC filings. We filed an application to potentially participate as a bidder in FCC Auction 108. Because of the FCC's anti-collusion rules, we're not able to discuss that auction, and we won't be answering any questions on it during the call today. We don't have opening remarks this morning, so we'll go straight to questions. Christina, let's start with the analysts. Thank you. We will now take questions from the analyst community. If you would like to ask a question, please press star one now to enter the queue. Take our first question from Philip Cusick with JP Morgan. Hey, thanks, guys. I wonder if we can talk about, Charlie, funding requirements. You have a maturity in March and some others in 2024 while your CapEx is still ramping. Can you talk about that? Can you give us a little bit of an overview as well on the credit back in the first quarter from the first quarter on the T-Mobile contract? Then just talk about the competitive environment in wireless overall. Thanks very much. I didn't hear the third question. Did you? No, Phil, we didn't get that third question. Can you repeat it? All right, we'll answer the first two. I think he said competitive environment. Well, yeah. I'll take the first part and then Paul will take the second part. Obviously, we've disclosed the last couple of quarters that we will need to raise capital. We have $1.5 billion of debt coming due in March of next year. Obviously that's a focus for ours, and we believe that the markets, while they're choppy, are available to us today. Obviously more expensive than we'd like today. We'll continue to monitor that as we have over the years for the right spot and the right strategy for that. On the accounting question, Paul? Yeah, sure. A good question there. We did book the Q1 impacts from the new T-Mobile deal into Q2. The deal was effective 1/22. So you see about a little over five months of that. If you look at the six months run rate that's disclosed in the Q, that'll give you a sense of what that may look like. Do keep in mind, though, that the Q2 numbers for the six months do have a negative impact of the CDMA migration costs in it. Paul, can you quantify at all for us what that number might look like going forward, just to help us? Maybe you can make it easy for us. I don't agree with you. Well, we don't disclose that, Charlie. Oh, we don't disclose that. We don't disclose that. Okay. If you look at the six months run rate. Okay. Yeah. You basically asked those. Yeah. What was the third question? I didn't quite hear it. I'm sorry. Just trying to think about how you think about the competitive environment in wireless, whether that's the prepaid business you've been in for a long time, or the postpaid business you're evolving into. Any update on the handsets that are supposed to be coming in October to ramp up your efforts. Thanks. Okay. Okay, thanks. The competitive environment's kind of interesting. Certainly, one of our focuses is the prepaid business, is a low margin business with higher churn. As a financial analyst, former financial analyst, I always scratch my head a little bit at how the industry actually gives somebody without credit many times a better deal than somebody with credit. We're probably the only country in the world where prepaid is actually less expensive than postpaid. I think that that's a place that as people, as inflation and people look and start thinking about raising prices, which we've seen a little bit in the industry, that's a place that probably could be a bit more profitable than it is, and I think people will look at that. The competitive environment's good. I mean, the big picture is phones are a necessity, and your wireless connection is a necessity. It's, you know, after food and water and shelter, it's just about next in line. We're the fourth biggest player there, and we're the ones that have the room to grow. We like that part of the business. Now, we've got many things we have to do to get there, but we've done a lot of them already. We actually had a really good quarter in terms of the things that we accomplished that we needed to on our side to get to that spot. One of our problems, as you correctly point out, has been that we haven't had devices with our Band 70, which is unique to DISH in those devices. Those devices, and John can talk in more detail about this, but for purpose of this answer, those devices start to show up in the third quarter and every quarter we get more devices, which help us be more competitive there. Thanks, Charlie. We'll take our next question from John Hodulik with UBS. Great, thanks. You guys signed a new MVNO agreement with T-Mobile in the quarter. Could you just talk about that and the sort of, you know, contrast that with the existing agreement you had with AT&T, and how that may change how you guys go to market, either from a network standpoint or a, you know, pricing standpoint, and... That's number one. Any other color you can give us on the launch of Boost Infinite and the strategy on the post-paid side for later this fall. Thanks. I'll let Stephen talk about the second question. The first question is, first let's look at the big picture. We had an unhealthy relationship with T-Mobile. For them, they're under consent decree from Department of Justice, which doesn't work for them very well. The good news, I think, for both companies, was that... We obviously had a big controversy in CDMA shutoff, which was very negative for DISH through the end of this quarter, end of last quarter. It was a bigger negative than the market probably appreciated, and we certainly did our best to warn people about that and try to lessen the effect of that, but we were fairly unsuccessful in that. Regulators pretty much did not take a position other than California, so that was disappointing. We're through that now, and we were able to solidify our relationship with T-Mobile. As people on this call know, they universally are acclaimed to have the best 5G network in the United States. The reality of it is that AT&T has more coverage than does T-Mobile. In a funny sort of way, we have the best of both worlds to use both our partners, both of our MVNO partners, in different ways, obviously, you know, and to arbitrage that in different ways. The contracts have different sets of economics in some cases. When we have a customer, the first place we're gonna wanna put them is in our network. Depending on the customer, we have a little bit of machine learning that says, "Let's put this person on T-Mobile or AT&T, that's the right place for them." Or perhaps this customer is gonna be roaming and based on roaming, you know, this is where we might put them. It's a factor that's not understood by The Street. Obviously, we can't disclose our contracts, but strategically, we're in an interesting position there with roamer economics coming, and a really good coverage company with a really good network that is consistent and has broad coverage. The up-and-coming network, which is not an up-and-coming network anymore, but a technically elite network in 5G in T-Mobile. You know, I think we're in a position to succeed here. With that, I'll turn it over to Stephen on the Boost Infinite question. Yeah. For Infinite, we're not gonna talk too much about what we're specifically doing on the proposition side today. More will come out later in the year. It is exciting. I mean, it's a big focus. It's a more aggressive expansion into post-paid for us. Two points I will highlight. Obviously, it's opportunity to come in fresh and do things in a slightly different way and in a more aggressive way. Two, it's on our own platform. Unlike what we've been doing with Boost, where we're tied to a vestigial T-Mobile platform with limited capabilities, essentially weights around our ankles, we are now operating on our own platform. Infinite will launch on our own digital-centric platform that allows us to be far more aggressive, nimble, and flexible, which translates into competitiveness as well. Boost Infinite is a big focus internally. Will be more coming out on that later in the year. Charlie alluded to some of the network economics that allow us to be also competitive as well. Yeah. I wanna just highlight the economics. I mean, the post-paid is. You guys always put a bigger value correctly on post-paid, but it's, you know, you're talking about 1% churn versus 4% churn in prepaid. Higher ARPU. You know, it's a, it's materially different in terms of economics. We haven't been able to play in the red zone part of the field to score touchdowns. In prepaid, you're lucky to kick a field goal once in a while. You know, I think we're gonna be able to start scoring some touchdowns when it comes to economics of that. Got it. Thanks, Charlie. Go to our next question from Douglas Mitchelson with Credit Suisse. Oh, thanks so much. I've got a few hopefully brief questions. I'll just ask them one at a time. I mean, Charlie and Dave, how's the network build going? How well is the network working, Charlie? The build's going really well. You no doubt saw that we completed our 20% milestone on June 14th, and we're marching on towards the milestone for the middle of 2023. We're, you know, at about 5,000 sites deployed and on air, and we're on a pace of about 1,000 sites a month, and we'll continue on that rate for the balance of the year and into next year. In terms of quality, I think we're pretty happy with the data experience. I think we continue to have work to do on the VoNR experience, you know, as does the rest of the industry, we're not unique in that respect. You know, I reflect back to VoLTE launches, you know. It's been close to a decade ago now, and it took some time to get VoLTE working, you know, so that you could, y ou could use it as a standalone service. Even with VoLTE, the carriers had a circuit switch fallback. You know, we don't have that, but we will have a VoNR network that is standalone and will operate well. That will, you know, we'll launch VoNR when we have that capability fully optimized and available and working really well for our customers. It's great we've got the MVNO deals to support us until we get to that point. Yeah. I'll just add some color to what Dave said. You know, we had our milestone for next year is 15,000 towers. You know, we're 1/3 of the way there. We'll be 2/3 of the way there by the end of the year. We're on a cadence to do that, and that you get a lot of economies of scale when you can actually have a cadence like we do on that. We had a strategic decision to settle on voice, whether we put a bunch of legacy in there that we're gonna live with forever, or just go with the better voice of VoNR. That has been an unexpected negative in the sense that that has taken longer. That, you know, many people in the industry expected to have VoNR in their systems by the beginning of this year. T-Mobile and DISH are the farthest along. T-Mobile's in two markets today. Obviously, we're in over 100 markets with it. It is not good enough, in my opinion, for the customer experience that you have to have in voice. It is hampering our ability to put users on our network unless they're data users. We're a lot more of a data-centric network. While we have voice, we go through some extra steps to make that work. It's a little bit clunky, and we're looking forward to doing that. On the positive side, a real positive side, while our vendors are helping us with VoNR, the addition of Samsung as a vendor in the quarter with true O-RAN was kind of a threefer for us. First of all, they it gave us a second supply of radio, so we weren't single source to Fujitsu. Second is they have devices. They are a large device manufacturer, and so they are very attuned to VoNR and Band 70. It helps us with probably the two biggest negatives we have, which is how do you get the bands, and how do you get VoNR to work. You've got a real technology leader that's taken some of the system integration off our shoulders. They're just better at it on those particular issues than we are, along with Mavenir. Those companies are doing great work to solidify those parts of our business. That was a huge positive for us that probably not appreciated by the street. On that Band 70, I think I hear the analyst say there's some discussion that, you know, the same antenna form factor that's already in phones for adjacent bands could add Band 70 at no additional upfront costs for the phone manufacturers. So that would lead to a very broad set of handset availability for DISH. Is that effectively, you know, Charlie or John, the right way to think about? You talked about Samsung helping you with Band 70. Is Band 70 gonna effectively be in most phones in relatively short order? Does it cost more to put it in? John? Just a follow-up, Doug. It's John. So we talked about this a little bit on the last quarterly call. I'd say we're on track to get Band 70 into the devices with a broad range of manufacturers. Charlie mentioned we'd start receiving devices in Q3. We'll start distributing them in the fourth quarter broadly across all of our markets. The certainty is, as Dave said, as we get VoNR tuned up and running in each market, we'll focus on having Band 70 devices with VoNR loading on our network as those markets open up. The key is that Band 70 plus VoNR is important, right? There are some Band 70 devices that exist today where we haven't quite gotten to the VoNR software certification yet. We really need to get both of those things right. We'll be bringing those devices in, starting with an expanded Android lineup, here later this year. On the cost side, I don't wanna speak for the handset manufacturers, but the extent there is a cost, I would say it's immaterial. That's correct, Charlie. It's immaterial. All right, thanks. Lastly, I'm just curious if there was working capital headwinds the first half of this year, does that continue, and is that related to the way you're running prepaid or just the build out of 5G in some form? Then Charlie, you know, just any further comments you have on financing needs and ability to finance and options to finance. Certainly, one of the things I think the market is most worried about is a lot of maturities in the next few years, and DISH's sort of sources of capital to roll those over. Thanks. Why don't you take the- Yeah. As it relates to working capital, we did have some headwinds the first half of the year. Those should level out in the second half of the year, so hopefully won't have as much of a drag. You know, it had to do with, you know, obviously the 5G build. It's costly. The timing of the payments does cause the drag that you saw in the first half of the year. On the financing stuff, I don't have a lot of color to add to what I said. I mean, you know, but I guess I may give a general thing. The markets are choppy, so they're not, you know, they're certainly not at the same level they were a year ago. Having said that, there's a lot of liquidity in the marketplace, so you can raise capital with a good business plan, and I think we have a great business plan. I think we have a variety of things that we could do in terms of raising capital. It's, you know, obviously, our board and our advisors are heavily involved in that. Like anything else, I think it'll be obvious where we need to go internally. I think as we go through the different options and as the market moves around, I think that's the case. You know, when you look at the quarter, you know, we accomplished probably more in the last quarter than we historically have ever come close to. You know, we made a build-out milestone that many people didn't think we could make. In the backdrop of COVID and supply chain, it was an A+. I mean, very few companies could have done what we did there. We were able to build a strong relationship with T-Mobile that was unhealthy before and now is a healthy relationship. We got the CDMA with a huge negative and got behind us in terms of the CDMA shutoff, and our phones were jammed with people that about upgrades and why did they lose their service, and our marketing money had to go to convert people. Now our marketing money gets to go to new customers. When people talk to people on the phone, it's about becoming a customer, not about how they, their phone's gonna be shut off, so it makes a big difference. Then we strengthened probably our biggest weakness, which was in on the supply side, and on the technology side with Samsung. Those are really big things for us. You know, because we know we're raising... If you look at the next half of the year, what are we focused on? We're really good at focusing on things and accomplishing them. We do need to raise capital, and obviously, you'll read about it when we raise capital, I guess, is what I'd say. We realize that that's an overhang, and we realize that there's many out there that don't have confidence in our ability to do that. We're certainly aware of that. You know, obviously, we're gonna significantly expand postpaid. That's a much more profitable business for us. There's a lot more customers in postpaid. There are avenues in postpaid that we think we can compete in that aren't available to us in prepaid. We have another milestone. Dave and his team are focused on that. We're gonna make that build out and improve the network as we go along. Then, you know, we're finally in a position, second half of the year to deploy our own digital marketing and billing platform. You guys don't have visibility to this, but all of that's done today by T-Mobile, and we have to go through the Department of Justice to change something. When we change something, it takes months and months and months. If you wanna change a program for the consumer, it takes months, and you can't be competitive in that environment. With our own platform, we can change in hours. You know, there's just a lot of things going on. We still have two headwinds out there other than raising capital, which I'd put in that category. Certainly, VoNR and making sure technically VoNR works, and our vendors are helping us with that. We have made VoNR work, so I don't wanna discount that. But we're just not making it work as well as LTE, as the current voice. We've just gotta get better and obviously get bigger supply devices and some lower cost devices. You know, we're... I don't know that we exactly know the date we're gonna make all those things work, but we know we have devices in the second half of the year, and we're confident we can make VoNR work. That's kinda where we are. You know, behind all that's a pretty good business, not pretty good, is a really good business plan that I think we can raise capital off of. Next question, operator. Yes, we'll take our next question from David Barden with Bank of America. Hey, guys. Thanks so much for taking the questions. Charlie, at the risk of antagonizing you with another financing question, you know, the March 2023 paper has a 5% coupon. If you wanna refinance it 5 years out, it's a 15% coupon right now for DISH. You've got kinda two options. One is to try to take down the 2023, 2024, 2025 and clear the decks and, you know, make sure your business plan is funded based on the strength of what you've executed on to date. Or you can maybe simply kinda chip away at it, hitting singles, you know, hoping that the rate market improves. I was wondering if you could at least share your thinking on that. If I could ask a second question, which would be, you know, when we were at the Analyst Day, we kinda held up Vegas as the flagship market. Could you tell us a little bit about what's happened in Vegas? What's the retail strategy? How many subscribers? How fast is the network? What's the uptime? You know, what can we look forward to as we continue to get the build deployed? Thanks. Okay. Obviously, we have to raise capital. It's gonna be more expensive than 5%, no matter what, probably, given today's market. Having said that, that's unsecured paper. It's a little bit different. There's other opportunities to raise capital. Besides. I wouldn't expect it to be 15%, right? Obviously, it depends on the markets as to whether you're hitting singles, doubles or home runs. You know, again, we're confident as management when it comes to looking at the different financing options and making the right choice for this company long term. As far as the Vegas market, the number of subscribers, and we're not obviously disclosing that, but most of the customers we have, not all, but most of the customers are data customers, and they're not material to our business yet. Thanks, Charlie. We'll go to our next question from Jonathan Chaplin with New Street. Thanks. Again, at risk of antagonizing with another financing question, Charlie, I wonder if you can give us a sense of where you're thinking of raising capital. Would it be at DBS, or at networks? And then a more important question, with the new MVNOs that you got with AT&T and T-Mobile that allow in-market roaming, I think that allows for a much more capital efficient network build than you were initially planning. And with some of the other benefits from the MVNO, lower rates on the MVNO, I would imagine that's helped cash flow. Is the funding gap at networks to get you through to your build-out requirements still at $10 billion, or is it something lower than that now? Well, nobody's gonna be mad at us if we come in below $10 billion. I think we're looking to build out cost through 2025, which is our final milestone. You know, maybe this is misunderstood, but we're looking to build out cost through 2025, which is our final milestone. Obviously, when you get to more rural America, there's costs there that you don't have for the next milestone. I think you did a report that probably was in the ballpark of funding. But maybe not everything in there was completely accurate, but you're in the ballpark, give or take, in terms of where we'd go. You're correct that the new deal with T-Mobile and other things are you know make our business from a profitability perspective you know in better shape than it otherwise was before. Certainly in-market roaming is good for us for a variety of reasons. We have that both with AT&T and T-Mobile. We didn't have that with T-Mobile before. There's just things around the edges that you know have improved. Again, when it comes to funding, we look at all the options, Jonathan. There's nothing that we don't look at. We look at every business we have, we look at every you know structurally, and we look at every kind of financing that can be out there. I mean, I guess people on the call will have confidence one way or the other, right? But assuming the marketplace doesn't get materially worse than it is today, then you know, we're gonna get our network built. We're gonna get our network built. You know, the only guidance we gave you at Analyst Day, we're gonna become a Fortune 100 company. That means we're twice as big and twice as profitable as we are today. I don't have a timeline on that, you know. I wish that was tomorrow, but that's where we're headed. Got it. Thanks, Charlie. We'll go to our next question from Walter Piecyk with LightShed. Thanks, Charlie. Earlier, you were talking about touchdowns and field goals and postpaid and prepaid, and I'm curious. I think there was a DOJ or maybe FCC requirement that said you had to, you know, basically sell some service to customers. Now that you're offering service on postpaid, do you continue to have to own Boost? Or is this something that since it's only scoring field goals in a division where you got the Chiefs putting up a lot of touchdowns, can you just punt that and just go with the postpaid business? I guess that really antagonizes me. No, I'm kidding. I'm kidding. Yeah. I wouldn't front saying my question is worried about antagonizing a CEO, that's for sure. Yeah. Well, most people don't even take your questions because you've already antagonized them. That's true. But, but that- He's like the- It's impossible. He's a pro. I've been married for. He doesn't want a tough question. Yeah. I've been married for 40 years, so it's tough to antagonize me. The answer is it's anything's possible. We look at everything, right? You know, and if you look at a list of options, owning all of Boost prepaid is not a necessity. I think there's a lot of synergies in owning that. The real value of our company is our network, right? All the things that are gonna come on that network. Again, we've said that we're in the wholesale business, so our capacity can be sold to others in the industry. We're not trying to monopolize our network, right? I guess the answer is, it's not a necessity, but we believe it belongs with us. Today, we'd prefer that it belongs with us. The division got a lot of competitors. More touchdowns, please. At the Analyst Day, I think Stephen did a good job at kind of talking about, I think after the whole technical team did, in talking about the power of having kind of an open network slicing, all that kind of stuff, how long is the enterprise sales cycle? When do you anticipate maybe having some kind of, I don't know what the term is, maybe flagship customers to demonstrate why the flexibility of your network might offer something unique, compared to what's in the market today? Stephen Bye would be the right guy to answer that. He's on a well-deserved vacation today. I don't know, John, if you wanna jump in here. The sales cycle is pretty long, is longer on that because you're talking to companies that are making long-term, pretty large commitments in some case, and they have to see how it saves them money. They have to see how it makes their product better. They have to see how they make their product safer, et cetera. We have really two strategies there that I think Stephen talked about. One is there are places where we think, you know, we probably could be the system integrator and add the greatest value, and it may be. An example might be in hospitality. We're already delivering video to our customers. We already have a relationship. There's a few others. But there's also a lot of areas that we probably don't have as much expertise or connections. The three largest players in the enterprise business today, you know, are people like Cisco and Amazon and Dell for hardware and optical and Wi-Fi and cloud. We have an opportunity to partner with them as a, what I would call a subcontractor, where they already have sales forces and relationships. It's a way for us to get into businesses as they get into business, and those companies wanna move beyond Wi-Fi into more licensed spectrum and more secure spectrum and more control of their spectrum. The sales cycles are longer than we like, but the deals are big and we continue to have continued increased interest in what we're doing there. We're a little bit you know, we now are up for air a little bit after the first milestone, and we're able to spend more time on those deals. They're not imminent, and they're not in the second half of this year. Got it. Last thing, if you could just give us any update on whether you plan on purchasing the 800 MHz spectrum, and same thing on DirecTV. I mean, I ask this kind of every quarter. It just feels like, you know, TPG is not AT&T, meaning that I think it's a company that can be effective at cutting costs, therefore it potentially reduces some of the synergy potential. Just curious what holds back, you guys, from proactively trying to pursue, you know, coming to some agreement to take to regulators on that deal. Yeah. On DirecTV, I say the same thing. We think that's inevitable. I do think you're close enough to the election today that I think regulatory is your biggest risk. I think you'd wait and see which way the wind's blowing. You know, you're gonna know that in the next couple of months. What was the other question? Oh, 800 megahertz. 800. We essentially have an option to buy that. Obviously, that's gonna depend on how we are financially. We like the spectrum. We think there's a lot of good uses for the spectrum. We're building out the spectrum in terms of our network, so that they're in our radio. It's in our radios. We had a potential fine from the FCC, but because we believe we've met our first milestone, that's off the table. There is a payment to T-Mobile if we weren't to purchase it. I think it's around $72 million. It's not a must-have for us. It'll depend on where we are, but it's a nice to have for sure. Great. Thank you. We'll go to our next question from Ric Prentiss with Raymond James. Thanks. A couple follow-up questions. Charlie, you touched on a couple of times today the irritant of the CDMA shutdown. Help us understand how much productivity was maybe lost with that effort. Is there dollars that come back in, or is it just dollars get refocused actually being productive as you think about where you're headed now that you're through that pain? Yeah. I mean, the hard cost was over $500 million. The indirect cost was probably another $1 billion. I mean, the way I'd say it is we've been playing defense for two years. Every day we come in now, we get to think about offense, and that's a whole different mindset, and it's a heck of a lot more fun to play offense than defense. You know, when you're playing defense, maybe you'll intercept a pass, but you don't score a lot of points on defense as many as you do on offense. What you hope to do is, like the University of Tennessee, get to hurry up offense, then you score more points. I gotta hurry up some of this management team here. They're, you know, I gotta hurry them up a little bit, give them some more coffee. I don't know. But- Another interesting area has been fixed wireless, right? People going on the offense to take share from cable operators and broadband. One, do you see an opportunity for DISH with fixed wireless access, and what do you need to kinda go after that market? The answer is yes, we do see fixed access on a number of fronts. The best, most profitable side is probably enterprise first, postpaid customer second, probably fixed wireless third, and prepaid fourth, right? We'll kind of stack rank it in there. A lot depends on how. You know, we're obviously watching what T-Mobile and Verizon are doing with that. I think there's some interesting things we could do with fixed wireless, particularly as you get more into rural America where we have distribution. Obviously, there's government funding there and other things. If If that government funding goes to your competitor, you don't have the right set of economics to play. If there's no government funding, we're probably pretty competitive. Obviously, to the extent we have government funding, we're obviously really competitive. It's a bit of an unclear market how it shakes out, but certainly our network is capable of it. In fact, our network's capable of it today. In fact, many of our customers are, in a funny sort of way, fixed wireless. Last one for me is, I think your SPAC is coming up on the November date. Any updated things you can share with us on the DISH call about what's going on with the SPAC company? No, I can't. How about, is that an IR team kind of information? There's a CEO there you can always call. Any updates to get an IR team so you can quit getting antagonized by all of us? What's that? Any update on IR team so you can quit being antagonized by all of us? Oh, on IR? Yeah. Well, I think we realize that we have to be more communicative and responsive to the Street. Obviously, the most logical step is that you've got somebody in charge of IR. We obviously piecemeal together. Sometimes you talk, sometimes you talk to people in the company or Paul or whatever. You know, we also need the right person, right? We have ideas in mind of what we think that looks like, and we've struck out a few times and it's on our list. It's probably not our highest priority, but I'd rather get the build-out done, and I'd rather get some other things done, but it's on the list of things we're looking at. Anybody in this call that really wants to be would work really hard, make no money, and talk to all you guys on a daily basis, you know, give us a call. Make no money till we make money, I should say. You're gonna make a lot of money. It's just gonna. It's not gonna be a freebie. Delayed gratification. It's delayed gratification. Shawshank Redemption at this company. We'll take our next question from Craig Moffett with MoffettNathanson. Hi. Thank you. I'm not gonna antagonize you with financing questions anymore. I think we've learned what we can learn. Let me ask you what your network is going to look like. You know, if now that you have the in-region roaming agreement that was talked about before, one way to think about sort of meeting your network requirements is sort of a high canopy of macro cell sites that sort of meets the coverage requirement. For enterprise customers, presumably what they're looking for is kind of higher speed and greater density in more concentrated areas. How do you think you deploy your capital going forward? Is it first just check the box for coverage, and then it's just sort of spending your money on small cells and density? Is it at the base of the tower because the mobile edge compute is going to be a focus of your business? I'm just wondering kind of where you think about allocating capital in the network itself. Yeah. I think it's a good question. It's much more nuanced than that. We're certainly building a macro network, primarily 'cause that's most of the traffic that will go to our retail customers. Where our retail customer might go, i.e., a tunnel, or a subway, or something that would be very expensive for us to build without a lot of customers, beyond our build-out, we'll continue to build. Our build-out milestones will continue to build, but we'll build on a success-based basis. You can appreciate this, Craig, in the sense that once you reach a certain amount of roaming charges, it will be more advantageous to have own economics, right? We'll see that long enough in advance and see the trends long enough in advance to build that. The same holds true for your commercial customers. The commercial customers where they might want more density, think about a college campus. Well, that's gonna be success based for the most part. You have a contract, you're gonna go build it out, because they want more density. But many of the, and what they really want is something that our competition has a tougher time with, which is they want a slice of a network that they control, and our architecture allows them to do it. Then there are some advantages for, based on the way we architected for edge compute, right? You know, there are some advantages that we have in terms of how we do that. It's a lot more nuanced. It's a lot more detailed than we're prepared to go with the Street on how we're doing it. The answer is our networks for the consumer. It's gonna look as good or better than anybody else. For other people, it's gonna be better in a lot of ways. There'll be some disadvantages in it, and we just won't market to that. As we deploy capital beyond the $10 billion, it will be success based. We know we're gonna get a return on it. We're not building it just to build it. Dave, I... Do you want to add something to that? No, I think you got it, Charlie. I mean, I think the roaming deals really, Craig, give us an opportunity to really not build some, y ou know, I think about all the venues. I mean, one of the first conversations Charlie and I had was about building SoFi and the cost to build SoFi. That's just something that we won't need to do because of the agreements that we have in place. Hey, operator. I think so. Go ahead. Sorry. Yeah, SoFi is a good example. You, for example, would say you're probably not gonna prioritize arenas and stadiums and things like that, which is more retail. But have you learned, for example, from Las Vegas and talking to customers in a specific market that their demand is, I need airports and for commuters and the executives of a corporation, or is it purely the data functions of the back office? I'm just trying to get more of a sense of how you match network topology to where the market opportunity is going to be for you guys. I think it really comes down, Craig, to what it costs to build versus what it costs to roam and those places where you can create a customer experience that is contained. You think about, you know, a stadium, you walk into the stadium, and you use your phone in the stadium. There's not a lot of handover traffic in and out of the stadium. You're actually captive for a long period of time. That's a great example of where with a network within a network, we could leverage somebody else's network to provide that coverage. That's probably the most profound example I can think of because you're captive, you know, as a customer for a very long period of time. The customer is gonna get the best of T-Mobile or AT&T in that case. Yeah. Sometimes T-Mobile is not in the arena, but AT&T is, or vice versa, or both of them are in there. Sure. We go with the better deal. The customer doesn't notice that. That's not a... There's no customer. We save capital. If you were to look at what I look at from a financial point of view, you'd say, "Wow, DISH has got a set of economics when it comes to network build and operation based on architecture and agreements in place that can allow them to be very, very competitive." It will be difficult for people to match our cost in this marketplace long term as we continue to build. We're literally 10 months away from the next milestone. That's a pretty big milestone. You know, look, we got headwinds on the financing side, as everybody's correctly pointed out, today, but we have to get through those things. If you're on the inside and you see this, it's, you know, I don't know. It's compelling, right? We'll see. We have to prove it. The way we focus the team every day is to build a great product. We believe if we build a great product, that we will be financially successful. That's the way we approach it. That allows us to take long term, have a long-term vision, do it right the first time, think long term about it. As long as we get from here to there the next year, then I think, hopefully, I believe our shareholders will be rewarded. You know, it's not 100% guarantee in life, but we believe that that's where we get to. All right, operator, we have time for one more from the analyst community. We will 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. We will begin the media portion of this call following the answer to this final analyst question. Our final analyst question comes from Michael Rollins with Citi. Hi, thanks for taking the question. Two, if I could. First, just pivoting over to the video side of the business, will the current macro environment accelerate linear and satellite cord cutting? Can you give us an update on the opportunity to turn Sling into a much larger live streaming platform in terms of subscriptions? Then the second topic or question is just on strategic partnerships. Charlie, in the past, you've talked about partnerships in a variety of different ways. Just curious if there's an update on the possible opportunity and timing for more strategic marketing or financial partners for the wireless strategy. Michael, this is Erik. I'll take the first question. I think that, you know, as we've discussed, in the past, both on the DISH TV and the Sling TV business, I mean, we really are heads down, and you can see it in, you know, our slowing growth, but also some of the profitability that we're focused on really still trying to acquire and retain customers that meet, our targets, you know, our targets for long-term and profitable growth. There's no doubt, you know, most of you have written adequately about it, that there is a decline in linear video. There's more competition than ever. You know, folks that we've had long-term relationships with on the content side are more in a frenemy bucket today. You're seeing us, you know, on the DISH TV side, do unique things. Historically, it goes back quite some time, like launching Netflix as an app on our service or Amazon or YouTube. We've talked a little bit about our Android TV box will help us, stem some of that from a retention perspective and help really integrate the customer experience as it relates to additional apps on the DISH TV, on the DISH TV platform. You know, the pay TV market is obviously in a bit of chaos and is definitely linear is declining a bit. It's up to us as management to stem that decline, and as you saw in our Q2 earnings, try to monetize the existing customer base as well as we can, while keeping the customer experience at an all-time high. I think the team has done a, you know although our growth targets aren't exactly where we want them to be, I think too the team's done a good job with their operational and financial discipline on that front. You know on Sling we're, you know, when, you know, you talk about SVOD and you talk about the number of apps and opportunities whether it's a, you know, a Peacock, a Discovery+, an HBO Max, a Netflix, et cetera. You know, lot of changes in consumer behavior there. You're seeing obviously the effect on Netflix, the spend on content, obviously stagnation in some of the providers. You're spot on. I mean, we're not happy exactly where Sling growth is. We've spent a lot of time and effort in making the customer experience a top customer experience. We now have to prove out that we can have value, and we can earn a place in folks' homes. We're not, you know, the number one subscription there, but we can be very complementary with the best of cable and provide customers a great value experience for some content that they may not wanna subscribe to from one of the SVOD folks. As you see in the market today, it's a very spiky market, right? There's a limited barrier to entry, and there's a very easy way to cancel. You know, one thing that we learned, you know, throughout the almost 27 years that I've been here is that we have to earn customers' business every day, and we have to do a better job of that at Sling. You know, I'd just add to Erik Carlson, the Sling, the OTT, there'll be some fallout in that and some consolidation in that. We're profitable, so not everybody, in fact, most people are not. I think we're well positioned there for things that might happen. You know, we're smart enough not to chase customers who aren't gonna be profitable. On strategic partnerships, obviously I'm not gonna talk about that in detail. The only thing I would say is that a 5G O-RAN cloud-native network is where telco is going. Perhaps 10% of the people thought that a couple years ago, maybe 50% of the people think that today. It'll be this time next year, it'll be 100% of the people that realize what I just said is true. It's a wonderful opportunity, particularly for our partners, to grow their business in a way that they probably didn't have in their strategic plan a couple years ago. Because they are in our network, they work in our network, they work with our team, and they can see where this goes around the world. The biggest growth for cloud providers is gonna be telcos, you know, in the next decade, right? As an example. I think that, you know, we have good alignment there, and we both have a lot to gain with each other. Well, You know, that's the big picture, but I'm obviously not talking about details. Thank you. All right, operator. We'll move to the media now. We will now take questions from members of the media. Again, if you are a member of the media and would like to ask a question, please press star one now to enter the queue to ask a question. Our first media question comes from Mike Dano with Light Reading. Yeah. Hi. Thanks so much for taking my question today. I wondered if you could just talk about your plans to your phone plans and how you plan to sell phones, particularly as the fall comes around and you've got this Boost Infinite service that's launching for postpaid. Are you gonna sell phones like the other carriers do, where, you know, they're essentially free to the customer and billed over, you know, two years or three years or whatever, or is it gonna be a bring your own device model? I'm just wondering what the thoughts are around how you're gonna sell phones. Thanks. Yeah, I'll take that, Mike. I think the answer is all of the above, right? We're gonna be competitive. I I think Boost Infinite, we're going to have options that cover all the gamut, and then we kind of segment. I'm not gonna get in too much detail on our segmentation and how we're sort of launching and, you know, our go-to-market strategy at this point. You and I have talked actually offline a little bit, so you have some background. We're gonna go all of the above. We're gonna be competitive in the market. We'll be selling phones. We'll be appealing. You know, we sell SIMs for those who want to bring their own device. And we'll sell across the gamut, Android and iOS. Got it. Thanks. We will take our next question from Scott Moritz with Bloomberg. Hey. Great. Thanks. I don't know if I speak for everyone here, but I'm looking forward to the day when we can conduct this call on your futuristic new network instead of this old dial-in method. My question, can you give us some, Charlie, maybe some glimpse of what's ahead for Boost Infinite in terms of maybe what the pricing might be, or the date of the launch, or maybe even the cities that you'll first target? Yeah, I mean, obviously, we're capable of being nationwide. Although there are certain cities that we've built out that would have a priority for us 'cause we'd have better economics there, obviously, I think the thing that maybe that we focus on is, obviously, price is an issue for customers, but so is coverage. There's really only two things that I see customers when I talk to customers, it's price and coverage. It weighs, you know, I'd say it's price one, two, three, coverage four, five, six, and maybe speed they get is speed or something else. You know, maybe they get a taco on Tuesday or something. Maybe something else down the list, but you know, there are reasons why people buy, and it's not always what's marketed. What we have to do ultimately is distinguish the user experience in a way that distinguishes us from other people, and that's what Steve and his team are focused on. We think with our network architecture and the things that we're doing, we have some ability to do that. It's no different than we got in satellite business, and we had to distinguish ourselves from cable and from our competitors. It was things like interactive guides or DVR or skipping commercials automatically, or being able to get Netflix out of the same box. Erik and his team changed the customer experience, and therefore, you know, we gained market share and churn went down. That's a similar, you know. We don't have 120 million customers like the other guys, so we have to be scrappier and more innovative and more entrepreneurial, and that's the fun part of what we're doing. I think you'll see Boost and Boost Infinite come up with creative things in the marketplace that both do things that give customers things they don't know they want today, and then improve on some of the pain points that they have. Did you wanna add to that? Yeah, I just had two quick points on that. One is, Charlie alluded to it, but our network deals allow us to go nationwide out of the gate at competitive pricing, and we are gonna come out with aggressive pricing. There's no point in coming out with a me-too play. Two, and again, Charlie alluded to it, but we do have 8 million, not 120 million customers. So from our perspective, we are not worried about losing customers or doing anything disruptive in the marketplace that could sort of shake up the current dynamics. We have a lot more to gain than we have to lose, so that puts us in a position where we can definitely play offense and take some big punts. All right, operator, we'll take one more before wrapping up. Our final media question will come from Drew FitzGerald with WSJ. Hey there, it's Drew. Thanks for taking the question. Charlie, if you could go into a little more detail on fixed wireless, and some of the lack of clarity that these upcoming government subsidy programs are providing. Do you have any sense of what you would like to see that would bring more clarity to the market? Once that happens, what would fixed wireless opportunities affect any of your decisions in building out your network? I.e., would it make your teams put some towers online or add capacity sooner in some markets rather than others, depending on what the opportunity to gain share in that fixed wireless market is? Thanks. Yeah. I'm gonna answer the question, start with a real broad answer, which is the government has allocated north of $60 billion for broadband. It is a necessity in the United States to bridge the digital divide. Every family, every child deserves access to education, health care, and broadband, right? That $60 billion, if properly spent, I'm very confident could get 99.8% of the customers broadband in the United States. It'll be as long as you take the best technology for the particular situation. In very rural areas, satellite would be the right answer. In very dense areas, I think it's a combination of kind of some of the things that T-Mobile and Verizon and the cable companies are doing. You've got some kinda areas that are kinda in the middle where maybe things like fixed wireless. Fixed wireless is not mobile, but fixed and also maybe some mobile and also maybe some cable, fiber, those kind of things, could all make sense and it's a bit, you know, and so forth. What I worry about is the first step is you have to know where you don't have coverage. The current chair, one of the FCC is very focused on making sure we know accurately where people don't have broadband. We didn't do a good job of that last time, in the last option for RDOF. That's the first place you start. I believe you have to be technology neutral. NTIA and the FCC need to be technology neutral, right? The third thing you gotta do is you gotta make sure that you're using all the resources. 12 GHz, as an example, is a resource that used terrestrially can far exceed the number of customers that you could do via satellite. We believe both technologies can exist together. If you had to pick one for capacity and for the American consumer, you would pick terrestrial because when you need more customers, you put up another tower. Satellites are, by the very nature of satellites, limited in the capacity that they can do. That's kinda where you start. The way I look at it is, where there's a government subsidy, it is unlikely, and we're not the person receiving the government subsidy, regardless of the technology that they're subsidizing, we're not likely to be competitive, so we're not gonna go there. Where there's no subsidy and it's the best man wins, we feel pretty confident. Where perhaps we are getting a subsidy, then obviously we would have an advantage over everybody else. The government's gonna be very involved in it. They will pick winners and losers, which we prefer they didn't do, but in this case they're going to do. I do think the current FCC, both Republican and Democratic side is pretty focused on it, and I think they understand the issues in a way that maybe they haven't in the past. I think NTIA will be very, and I saw today that they now for the first time they actually have an agreement to work together. That's critical. That's really positive. I think that, and fortunately or unfortunately, I think the government's gonna decide where we go with fixed wireless, and how we play there. You know, our goal as a company, regardless of whether we're the right company, is how can we help bring broadband to every customer home, just like every customer home has electricity. That should be our goal as a country. That's where we'd like to help. If we can help, we wanna do it. If we can't help, we'll do something else. Well, thank you all for joining. We'll talk to you again next quarter. This concludes today's call. Thank you for your participation. You may now disconnect.