Dish Network chairman and chief executive Charlie Ergen shed some light today on his recent moves to acquire wireless spectrum, but said he does not yet have a grand plan for the assets.
“We think spectrum has value. If you can do something with it strategically, it’d have more value,” Ergen said during a conference call with analysts.
Dish has proposed to acquire DBSD North America, a bankrupt satellite technology company that owns 20 megahertz of spectrum, for about $1 billion. Dish’s sister company, EchoStar, is trying to gain control of TerreStar Networks, which also owns 20 MHz of spectrum.
Analysts say the two contiguous blocks of spectrum owned by DBSD and TerreStar could be deployed in a high-speed wireless network buildout.
“There’s not a grand strategy at this point,” Ergen said.
Dish is the nation’s No. 2 satellite-TV provider with about 14 million subscribers. EchoStar makes set-top boxes. Ergen is the chairman of both companies, which are based in Douglas County.
Ergen said the proposed DBSD acquisition is being viewed as a separate deal at this point.
“We’re trying to get the company moving in the right direction,” Ergen said. “They have a management team. They have the satellite. They just need some capital to improve the business.”
DBSD is developing hybrid technology that uses ground-based and satellite communications systems for wireless voice and Internet services.
Tom Cullen, executive vice president of product development, said during today’s call that Dish plans to bundle services from recently acquired Liberty-Bell Telecom in some test markets in the next several months.
Liberty-Bell is a Denver-based competitive local-exchange carrier, or CLEC, that buys wholesale access to Qwest’s network and resells the service to 6,000 residential and 4,000 business customers in Colorado, New Mexico and Utah.
“We feel it is an opportunity for us test our ability to bundle wholesale broadband and voice as part of the CLEC contract with Dish video services,” Cullen said. “Stand-alone CLECs have always been challenged from a customer-acquisition standpoint on the residential side, but if you can dovetail that offering with our existing media spend and marketing efforts for the video product, we think there is an opportunity there.”
Andy Vuong: 303-954-1209, avuong@denverpost.com or
