Dish Network owns 40 MHz worth of spectrum in the 2 GHz band that they want to use to build an LTE-Advanced network. Earlier this year they wrote a letter to the FCC asking them for permission to build said network, and we’ve yet to hear whether or not they’ve been given the go ahead. That being said, Dish Network went ahead and filed a trademark for “Ollo” according to FierceCable, who says:
“According to two trademark applications Dish filed for Ollo on Nov. 9, the company would like to be able to use the brand for both mobile equipment and services, including mobile phones, tablets, and telecommunications services. Among the services Dish says the brand could be used for are wireless video, voice and broadband Internet access.”
When will said network go up? That’s unclear at the moment, though Dish did say that they expect a plethora of LTE-Advanced devices to be out on the market by 2014. We can’t imagine why the FCC wouldn’t give them approval to become a viable competitor in a market that’s currently contracting in terms of the number of players. We’ve yet to see what the government wants to do regarding AT&T’s purchase of T-Mobile, and to be honest we thought that thanks to the massive amounts of money AT&T throws at the government the deal would go through without any issues, but analysts are now saying that there’s a less than 50% chance that the T-Mobile takeover is going to happen.
Anyway, what sort of performance can LTE-Advance deliver? Ericsson used 60 MHz of spectrum in Sweden to achieve download rates of over 954 megabits per second. Assuming 40 MHz of spectrum scales smoothly, that would mean Dish would be able to deliver over 600 megabits per second, which is frankly mind blowing.
Stay tuned for updates as to what these satellite TV guys are doing.