Samsung will supply software and radios for Dish’s much-delayed 5G network

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

The deal that allowed T-Mobile to buy Sprint brought down our wireless carrier options to three. With the first deadline fast approaching, the company has announced a new partner. The company is trying to build a 5G network from scratch.

It isn't just any old 5G network that Dish is building. The network is based on a newer, cloud-based technology called O-RAN that relies on off-the-shelf hardware. The software and radio units that are supplied by SAMSUNG are used to make the whole thing work.

The FCC was promised by Dish that it would cover 20 percent of the population by June of this year, which is a milestone on the way to eventually covering 70 percent of the population. June is next month and the project has been plagued with delays. As of February, the network was still in testing with friends and family in Las Vegas. 20 percent of the US population is not included in Vegas, which has a lot of things.

It isn't the first US-based network operator that the Korean company has worked with. It helped expand the low-band Nationwide 5G with a technology called Dynamic Spectrum Sharing. The clock is running so let's hope that this new partnership with Dish produces better results than the one before it.