True nationwide, reliable coverage has been a pipe dream for both connected users and telecom businesses alike. With the help of Dell Technologies Inc., DISH Network LLC seeks to establish America’s first Radio Access Network 5G edge infrastructure.

This cloud-native network will be powered by Dell devices and will cover 75% of the population in the U.S. by June 2023.

“We felt that working with Dell through all these challenges made things easier,” said Richard Leitao (pictured, left), vice president of national development at DISH Network. “From an execution perspective, whenever you need to build a network and you are building thousands of sites and you need to have materials, you need to distribute them and you need to install them. Dell helped us across the board.”

Leitao and Satish Iyer (pictured, right), vice president and general manager of emerging services at Dell, spoke with theCUBE industry analysts Lisa Martin and Dave Vellante at MWC 2023, during an exclusive broadcast on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio. They discussed developing an O-RAN network, why Dell was chosen to take on this project, what values drive both companies and more. (* Disclosure below.)

Coverage achieved through collaboration

When DISH began working on its vision, there was only one company in mind to help it see it through. Getting a nationwide-coverage infrastructure is hard work, and Dell was one of the only companies with enough resources for a project of this scale.

“In the old days, you have a software stack and it takes you up to 20 months to get an upgrade done. Here, we have continuous CI/CD pipelines, where if you want to get a change done within a week or within a few days, where we can go and test and make sure these things work,” Iyer said.  “A lot of the best enterprise software practices, cloud practices, combined with whatever else is needed for telco, is what makes it unique.”

Keeping such a service up 24/7 requires extensive and exceptional customer service practices. DISH is optimistic that Dell’s experience with its own systems and prolific history will fulfill these needs.

“We found that this offering from Dell was addressing some of our needs … they know a lot in this area and can provide the best advice and the best speed to market in terms of having this equipment,” Leitao said. “Because we are working on a time clock, we need to have this done as soon as possible. And for the future, I hope that they can help us in driving more services.”

Dish Networks’ approach to Open RAN and 5G networks appears to focus on flexibility and innovation, whereas others in the market, for example Rakuten, are focusing on replicating traditional RAN reliability and stability. These two strategies will likely appeal to different audiences. Firms like Dell rely on new silicon components and the ubiquity of 5G chipsets from companies like Broadcom to enable the disaggregation of the telco stack to support new end-to-end workloads that could disrupt the existing telecommunications market.

Here’s the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the MWC 2023 event:

(* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for MWC 2023. Neither Dell Technologies Inc., the primary sponsor for theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE