Walmart or somebody cheap like that will keep satellite alive for awhile
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Directv to shift away from Satellite?
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I think Dish drops satellite before AT&T does. Dish has barely half the satellite subscribers Directv does, and has two arcs of satellites to maintain instead one meaning increased cost, so the point at which it is no longer profitable will be reached for Dish years before it is reached for Directv.
Also, as Charlie Ergen gets older he may lose interest and cash out. Their major asset is wireless licenses, that's what someone would buy Dish for. The more years go by before it is sold the less likely it is the buyer would be interested in even purchasing the satellite business - five years from now he might not be able to find a buyer at any price.
I think it’s more like around 13M Dish satellite subs and 19M DirecTV satellite subs. Roughly.
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This is what I mean about wanting to know about AT&T's TV strategy. They create DTV Now and DTV over the internet and call it Cable TV. Then they do this new commerical about quitting cable.
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This is what Stephenson called DTV NOW.
AT&T CEO: Bye-Bye DirecTV, Hello AT&T OTT Video - Telecompetitor
Stephenson referred to DirecTV Now as a “software-based solution for, let’s call it cable TV for want of a better term, just to be descriptive about it.”
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Sorry no. Directv reported 20.270 million satellite subscribers in their latest quarterly report, while Dish reported 10.845 million. The 13 million figure you're thinking of included Sling TV subscribers.
Yeah. AT&T is a huge, diversified company (even more so now with the Time Warner acquisition). They can keep the lights on at DirecTV for a long, long time if they choose to.
Dish is basically DBS + undeveloped spectrum licenses + a skinny OTT service that makes very little money. I think Ergen sees the spectrum as the thing that would attract a potential corporate buyout but -- given that there's not a huge appetite for more spectrum from any of the major players right now, and the fact that everyone knows that DBS is in terminal decline -- I'm doubtful that he's going to find any takers. Sure, the spectrum could be sold off at the right price but I doubt anyone wants to acquire it if they have to pay very much for the DBS business too.
I'm doubtful that Dish is ever able to sell their DBS business until either AT&T buys it to combine in with DirecTV or some third party buys both DBS operations and combines them. (A third option is that Dish ends up buying DirecTV from AT&T.)
When considering how long either DBS operation can be viable, an important thing to keep in mind is the advent of low-earth-orbit (LEO) satellite internet service. (Yes, I know, "best laid plans" and all that...perhaps none of those planned services ever materialize.) Starlink, from Elon Musks' SpaceX, is one such service in the works. OneWeb is another. What's to keep such a service from partnering up with an OTT TV provider, such as DirecTV Now, or the forthcoming premium OTT DirecTV service, and offering it as a bundled service with their home internet? Or even as a standalone service available through their satellite IP pipe without also subscribing to "regular" web access? Why would anyone choose to have a rooftop satellite dish that could ONLY give them traditional TV service when instead they could have one that gave them that kind of service PLUS everything else that can be accessed via the internet? These LEO satellite ISPs plan to offer service everywhere throughout the US, including rural areas, during the early-to-mid 2020s.
People subscribe to DirecTV for the programming..I would venture to guess the vast majority would not care if they switched to a IP based delivery as long as sufficient bandwidth at a reasonable cost was available
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I don’t think those LEO and MEO satellite schemes will remotely have the capacity to deliver millions of simultaneous HD and UHD streams.
And, frankly, as much as I like my Roku, I think most people will want a more conventional remote, but won’t understand how to do that.
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And, frankly, as much as I like my Roku, I think most people will want a more conventional remote, but won’t understand how to do that.
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I think that spectrum may be in high demand in the near future - all those holdings in the 2000-3500 MHz range are perfect for building out fixed wireless 5G. Low enough frequency to travel far enough to allow standard sized cells and they should have enough spectrum to cover them. Most towers in mid/large sized cities are rented not owned so a company just needs to pay someone to install antennas in the markets they want to cherry pick. Maybe Ergen is planning to have Dish do this itself and convert into a wireless internet company, who knows.
I agree the DBS business is a lot less attractive since it is now in obvious decline and converting them to Sling just means you have more customers in a low/no profit market segment with much lower barriers to entry than was true for cable/satellite. Directv sold out at just the right time, basically the peak of the market for satellite (whether AT&T was smart to buy them then or should have waited a few years to get a better price is a different discussion!)
Once fixed wireless 5G starts covering most rural areas, leaving only the REALLY rural areas (all the areas with the best dark sky viewing on the dark sky maps, basically) there won't be enough customers left to support something like this. I just don't see satellite internet (LEO or otherwise) as financially viable once wired or cellular internet is an option for 99.999% of the US population, even if that totals only 80% of the landmass.
But 5g will never reach that penetration level..by the time they hit 50% ..they will be talking 6g
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As you reference, Dish's spectrum holdings are low-band and mid-band, not the millimeter wave high-band stuff that will primarily be used for super-fast (1 gig plus) 5G. And the big wireless players, especially Verizon and AT&T, are pretty well stocked up on low-to-mid-band spectrum, which is why the bidding wasn't as aggressive as expected in the last FCC auction, when Dish stocked up on some more of that spectrum at relatively low prices. Furthermore, as CBRS and TV white space frequencies open up, and carriers also continue to exploit wifi frequencies with LTE-U, that will further ease any need to buy more spectrum licenses.
So, what do you mean when you talk about fixed 5G covering rural areas? Because millimeter wave 5G -- which is what most of the hubbub is about -- won't ever broadly cover rural areas since it only travels short distances. I suppose you're referring to the type of 5G that T-Mobile plans to roll out over their low-band 600 MHz spectrum, which can travel quite far and serve huge rural areas. But at that frequency, the speeds will be much lower than at millimeter wave frequencies, although it's somehow technically still 5G and so, I guess, offers somewhat more bandwidth than regular LTE would on that same 600 MHz. (T-Mo is already lighting up 600 MHz in many areas with LTE and say they can switch those radios over to 5G with just a firmware update.)
T-Mobile has stated that they will for sure offer fixed wireless home internet to rural dwellers on their new 600 MHz spectrum soon. (In fact, that's part of their pitch to the feds to gain approval for their merger.) Should they be allowed to merge with Sprint, their total spectrum holdings would definitely exceed both Verizon and AT&T. So, as this article explains, that could put pressure on those two companies to buy some of Dish's spectrum, to play catch-up. But then the merger may be blocked or the combined T-Mobile/Sprint may be forced to sell off some of their combined spectrum to Verizon and AT&T as a condition of the merger to even the playing field. In either of those latter two scenarios, Dish would still be sitting with a bunch of spectrum that no one much cares to buy. Obviously, Ergen is hoping that the government allows the T-Mo/Sprint merger to sail through with no real conditions attached. I'm not sure that's in the cards, but who knows.
Assuming that Verizon and/or AT&T began competing with T-Mobile in the early 2020s to offer nearly-nationwide wireless home broadband service at pricing that matches what we typically see in metro areas from competing landline providers, then yes, LEO satellite internet would have a hard time gaining enough customers to be a sustainable business. But in that scenario, we're talking about rural Americans gaining widespread access to affordable broadband even sooner than would be the case with LEO satellite internet service. Which means that DBS will be doomed even sooner than I was anticipating before (at 2028). Because once folks have reliable broadband with high or no data caps, and AT&T is offering them virtually the same service OTT as via DBS, but at a lower monthly rate, why wouldn't they switch? Or switch to one of the other OTT vMVPDs? Or switch to a combo of on-demand OTT services such as Netflix, Hulu, Disneyflix, etc?
Again, rural dwellers without access to affordable, reliable broadband service will be the last bastion for DBS. AT&T knows that and has stated it. But once that rural digital divide is closed -- around, say, 2023-26 -- that's when DBS will truly become a rare things that survives only because of the ingrained habits of mostly elderly folks who don't want to switch it out for something better and cheaper because they dislike change. But it's hard to keep a large-scale operation afloat serving just that demographic, I'd think.
As I've said before, there is ZERO difference in bit rate per MHz between LTE and 5G. The reason 5G "advertises" higher speeds is because it can use more MHz at once - the same reason why LTE has gone up and up in speed to beyond a gigabit. 1.2 Gbps LTE is the same bit rate per MHz as 150 Mbps LTE, it just uses more MHz at once. The only reason why you should care about 5G is because of latency - i.e. 'ping time' if you use it for internet. That's where it makes a big improvement over LTE. The increased speeds generate a lot of press but are an illusion created by all those millimeter wave bands opening up. If they'd opened up a few years ago LTE would have used them, big deal.
Rural areas are, well, rural so there aren't a lot of people trying to hit the same cell tower at once. Even fewer are trying to hit the same cell tower at once from the same direction, which is what really matters thanks to frequency re-use, so even though there's a lot less MHz available in Dish's mid bands (I don't think the 600/700 MHz range is useful for fixed wireless, there just isn't enough of it and frequencies that low are too valuable for mobile devices to waste on fixed wireless) versus millimeter wave, there will be very few users even with standard size rural cells. Sure, they won't be able to offer 1 Gbps, but no one needs 1 Gbps. I defy anyone to provide me with a use case for where a residential customer needs anything approaching that speed. Anyone who "upgrades" from 300 Mbps to 1 Gbps on their internet service is wasting their money unless it is to get a bigger cap, because they aren't using that extra speed (and that's assuming they are actually getting it at all (read the fine print))
Dish (or whoever buys their licenses) easily has enough spectrum to sell say 100 Mbps service in rural areas, which is more than enough for streaming TV plus other internet needs and more to the point is more than they get now and INFINITELY better than what they get now. GEO satellite internet is not competitive with that at any speed, due to its latency, and wired just isn't an option out there or we wouldn't be talking about how to get internet to rural customers...
So? As I keep saying, there's nothing magical about 5G. It doesn't offer any improvements over 4G LTE aside from latency and a lot of millimeter wave spectrum coincidentally opening up around the same time. Someday 6G will come, but that won't mean that existing fixed wireless 5G deployments suddenly stop working, or that people with 5G fixed wireless internet will have any reason whatsoever to upgrade to 6G fixed wireless. There might be some even higher frequencies opening up which will allow them to advertise 50 Gbps with 6G, but in the real world people will still be using maybe a few hundred Mbps at most and have no need of multiple gigabits.
Heck, some early fixed wireless deployments are using LTE, but those will continue working once 5G is getting deployed - but those people would have a reason to upgrade because they'd get vastly improved latency with 5G versus LTE.
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