Also underscores my assumption that Dish is sunsetting Ting to push everyone to Boost in the coming years.
Probably not. Dish's viewpoint is slightly different than Verizon and T-mobile.
"...
“We’ve said that we’re in the wholesale business, so our capacity can be sold to others in the industry, so we’re not trying to monopolize our network,” he said. “I guess the answer is it’s not a necessity but today we prefer that it belongs with us.”.
...
Stephen Stokols, the executive in charge of Dish's retail wireless business, spoke of the more aggressive expansion into postpaid that Dish has planned for later this year with the
Boost Infinite brand.
..."
https://www.fiercewireless.com/wireless/dish-prefers-keep-boost-now-ergen
I think the plan at one point was to turn Boost into their "Premium" holding brand. Not completely shut down the current customer base , but not necessarily 'roll up' all the discount alternatives either.
The disconnect from reality is that Dish is more so in the buying wholesale business right now rather than selling it.
They appear to want to be able to pull in more MVNOs , so having some in-house ones can somewhat demonstrate that they could/would be competent at that if subsidiaries are running systems that integrate cleanly with the network backend. However, also competing so it is a bit dual edged.
Boost is loosing subscribers. Trying to force Ting users to offset the exodus from Boost would likely end badly for both subsidiaries. That isn't going to dig Dish out of the huge hole they are in. Dish is way far behind the curve putting up infrastructure to be able to the monetize the spectrum that they paid many , many billions of dollars to get access to. Shuffling the deck chairs on the Titanic isn't going to help plug the hole or closer the water tight doors from the iceberg.
I think Ergen is in this 'wishful thinking' mode where hoping to just provision back end network while customers churn across MVNOs that are sitting on top of the same network. The end users customers are moving, sim changing, phones shifting, etc. with steady churn, but the aggregate network payments all stay approximately the same.
Some of that is managing 'optics' with the finance analysts. ("don't mind that huge debt load .. we will have reliable stream of payments to make interest & principle payments on time. "), but some of that seems like non attention to detail ( not going to retain lots of outside MVNOs if you don't have very good , very reliable network for their end user customers. They do need to care deeply about the end users' experience. Squatting on gobs of 'empty' spectrum isn't good for end users. )
There is a narrow tightrope Dish can walk to becoming a long term viable 4th player. They aren't certainly doomed (as literally the Titanic ). However, if they screw up too much not, they going to survive either.
P.S. The articles suggestion that selling Boost would solve Dish's funding problem. Probably not. Just more reshuffling deck chairs. ( if have a MVNO backbone network and have no MVNO customers ... it isn't going to matter. If they saddle some new entity with high debt then they are more likely going to seek a deal with T-mobile to abandon Dish's network. And T-mobile would likely give it to them. ).
