Right on schedule, Boost Mobile has become part of Dish Network.
Dish today announced that it has completed its acquisition of Boost Mobile from T-Mobile, which cost $1.4 billion. Dish Network is now in the wireless market and has more than 9 million customers. Boost will be lead by John Swieringa, who serves as group president of retail wireless and COO at Dish Network.
As part of its acquisition of Boost Mobile, Dish has given its new wireless brand an updated logo. It’s not a huge change, pretty much just taking the old Boost logo and slapping the Dish logo inside of it. Dish’s name is now on the Boost Mobile website, too, reading “© 2020 DISH Wireless L.L.C. All rights reserved.” at the bottom of the page.
Dish is also bringing back Boost Mobile’s $hrink-It! plan. Previously offered by Boost through July 2014, the $hrink-It! plan starts at $45 per month for 15GB of data and then that price drops by $5 after 3 on-time payments, followed by another $5 drop after 6 total on-time paymetns. Boost will also offer a $35 plan that includes 10GB.
Both plans will be available starting tomorrow.
As for its network, Dish will have access to the T-Mobile network for 7 years while it builds out its own 5G network. Boost is activating customers with a compatible device onto the T-Mobile network.
Dish continues to work on getting its own standalone 5G network up and running. The company says that it recently selected Fujitsu for radio units and Altiostar and Mavenir for cloud-native, Open RAN software.
Today’s news about Dish and Boost is notable because it means another major aspect of T-Mobile and Sprint’s merger is complete. To help the deal get approval from the US Department of Justice, T-Mobile and Dish struck a deal aimed at getting a replacement for a 4th major US carrier to replace Sprint. That included Dish buying Sprint’s prepaid assets for $1.4 billion as well as purchasing Sprint’s portfolio of nationwide 800MHz spectrum for $3.6 billion. As mentioned before, Dish also gets access to T-Mobile’s network for 7 years while it builds out its own 5G network.
As part of the deal that was announced with T-Mobile and the Justice Department, Dish is required to deploy a nationwide 5G network that covers at least 70 percent of the US population by June 14, 2023. If it doesn’t, it’ll need to pay $2.2 billion to the US Treasury.
Right now Dish is just getting started in the wireless business, and it’s definitely going to be interesting watching as the company becomes part of the wireless market in the US.
Thanks Howard!
Sources: Dish Network