In the cellco space, DISH is crashing. Almost filed BK, own billions to Crown Castle, Am Tower and other supplies for towers and fiber after they acquired Boost Mobile from T-Mo to be the 4th Cellco. Well, now DISH – well, Echostar really, because the parent company swallowed the DISH. DISH got in a fight with the FCC – Techdirt has the snarky summary HERE.
Echostar has decided to sell its 3.45 GHz and 600 MHz spectrum licenses to AT&T for $23B. EchoStar (parent company of Dish Network), announced in September and November 2025, that it sold significant wireless spectrum licenses (AWS-4, H-block, and unpaired AWS-3) to SpaceX for approximately $19 billion total.
That puts the nail in the 4th cellco coffin because USCellular sold its spectrum to AT&T, T-Mo and VZW.
So now it is just an MVNO war.
The largest US MVNOs are Comcast and Spectrum with 9M and 11M subs respectively. These cablecos use a wholesale agreement with VZW from a spectrum sale years ago. They move as much cellular traffic as they can to wifi offload (traffic goes onto their own cable ISP network). Now they are building out CBRS small cells to get further independent of the MNO (VZW). “Charter Communications and Comcast have deployed $922 million in CBRS spectrum and are now converting it into strand-mounted small cells, fundamentally changing the economics of their wireless businesses.”
The cablecos are in a unique situation, ‘Comcast CEO Brian Roberts explained that 3% of Comcast’s geography generates 60% of its mobile macro network traffic.” They don’t have to build out nationwide.
“88% of Spectrum Mobile traffic now runs on Charter-controlled infrastructure, including Wi-Fi, CBRS and cable partner networks. That 88% figure represents a near-complete inversion of the traditional MVNO model, where operators pay wholesale rates on virtually all traffic.”
The MVNO market in the US is awful. Visible, Cricket and Mint are owned by the MNO/cellco, VZW, AT&T and T-Mobile, respectively. Some now call them brands instead of MVNOs. I think the corporate structure would point to MVNO land.
With Echostar’s Boost Mobile brand dying on the vine, Echostar itself is using AT&T’s network, so technically Echostar and by extension Boost are MVNOs. To be an MNO you have to own and operate the network. dish
I think most consumers try to balance price with reliability. And this twitter user explains why a large chunk of buyers shop by brand: He doesn’t trust the brand. He thinks that MVNOs don’t own the network so they don’t have priority. (I hate to tell him that unless he is paying $99 per month per line, he isn’t getting priority from the MNO either.)
Peter Adderton is the CEO of MVNO MobileXUS. He calls out all the BS in the MVNO and cellular industry. He posted this: “Seeing reports on Reddit that some MVNOs are now capping their “unlimited” plans, and that plans which were once free are becoming less free. The reality is these offers were never sustainable. They’re designed to grab as many customers as possible, then quietly change the terms and hope most people won’t bother to leave.”
Adderton thinks that the FCC has failed the MVNOs and that no one really wants MVNOs in the US market. Truthfully, MVNOs are just CLECs. CLECs had regulatory cover to offer services they purchased at wholesale in full from the ILEC and charged less for that service. The idea was that the CLEC would gain customers under this wholesale plan, then build out their own facilities. That is what Comcast and Charter are doing. Most CLECs did not build out facilities at all. When the FCC changed the UNE-P ruling and the CLECs mainly folded. Some like Granite and MetTel signed wholesale deals with VZ and AT&T to stave off closing. AT&T started a wholesale program called APEX because wholesale was still a big revenue channel and they didn’t want to lose it.
APEX and VZW allowed for wholesale of the 4G and later 5G networks. Many partners use it for broadband backup, not for consumer cellular.
Everything repeats itself in telecom. There isn’t really innovation. The vendors do the R&D. Then sell that turn-key to the providers. Branding, Packaging and Marketing are the differentiators (if there are any). And that is in all types of telecom – voice, cellular, UCaaS, broadband, POTS replacement and even AI. (Agentic AI is mainly putting a new Lovable face on ChatGPT.)