DTW 2022: Dish Wireless outlines B2B ambitions

Dish Wireless highlighted how its cloud-native, Open RAN-based 5G network is designed to solve customer problems in the enterprise space, enabling them to build their own applications and “unlock industry 4.0”.

Speaking remotely during Digital Transformation World 2022, Stephen Bye, chief commercial officer at Dish Wireless, said the US mobile operator’s network “is built for enterprise. Unlike most wireless networks that were initially built for consumers, this is an enterprise native network”.

Adam Saenger, VP product and marketing at Dish Wireless, warmed further to this theme by explaining that Dish is “building a capability, an ecosystem and a platform that will serve the enterprise better tomorrow and well into the future.”

The aim, he said, is to move from “what has traditionally been a physical ecosystem to one that is highly virtualized, putting the power in customers’ hands to manage their own policies, to manage their own network, to manage their own IT ecosystem.”

Saenger added that the adoption of cloud-native and Open RAN concepts will open up the ecosystem to new applications and enable enterprises to “unleash their value”. The ambition is to give back the data that “rightfully” belongs to the enterprise, he said. “No longer is this a closed and hardened ecosystem in which our enterprises have to operate.”

In Saenger’s view, Dish’s approach is “the exact opposite of what this industry has focused on for the last many decades.”

“In this industry we like to talk about the customer a lot, but enabling those who know their business best, developing the applications and services that serve their business and their industry best, unleashes a whole new opportunity. No longer is the enterprise anchored by the development process in timelines that the service providers have historically required. Power is in their hands,” he said.

Dish wants to evolve current customer journeys to an environment “where outcomes are to be modelled where a customer, prospect or user or developer can interact with the ecosystem at any point in the customer journey.”

Saenger conceded that trust still has to be built to ensure that enterprises come on board. “I don't think customers quite believe it yet,” he said.

At the same time, Bye claimed that there “isn’t a customer we talk to that isn’t interested in how they take advantage of this platform to realize the benefits for their business. The opportunity is massive. Today, wireless operators are only capturing a very small share of this, and we believe we can capture a disproportionate share as this market emerges.”