I lost connection to the internet when I got in my car with my phone. Project Genesis is only a few months old and only covers 25% of the US population. As you get closer to downtown, the service on my side of the state has gotten better. As I drove around the park, I became confused because my phone didn't connect to any of the towers.
Thanks to the T-Mobile/Sprint merger, Project Genesis is Dish's way to test the 5G network. It was a project to bring on early users that would be short-lived as we transitioned to full commercial operations with our brands. He said it isn't a full-scale launch of a brand and offers to compete with the large incumbents. Project Genesis is giving us a glimpse of what the service might look like.
Genesis was launched in 120 cities in June and was able to meet the legal requirement of covering 20% of the United States. It was difficult to find coverage in some areas and ordering a phone to use it was difficult. It covered at least a portion of the city, but it wasn't the most reliable thing.
That was a long time ago. The service only existed in Las Vegas before the public launch. The company had three months to build out the service and fix any problems. It has some work to be done.
Jeremy McCarty is the vice president and general manager of retail wireless at Dish. We feel good about the plan that we have.
We talked to the company about the plan to turn its network into a major competitor, as we continued to test the network.
Go over the features that feel missing and justify the headline. Project Genesis doesn't allow you to have multiple lines on an account and doesn't support bring-your-own-device support. It is understandable. The chipset that is required to support our network only exists in so many phones today because we are designing a new network that has never been done before. The company will make more devices that support its network.
Project Genesis doesn't have an account management system. I had to sign up with a service address that wasn't my home address because of the launch day issues. There is no web portal or screen in the app that allows you to change the details.
That is the case for billing info. If I want to change my payment method, I have to call support. I asked the support person if there was a way to check your billing history, but they told me there wasn't a way to do that at the moment.
I'm pretty sure the billing emails I've been getting are wrong, so that wouldn't be good, but it's worse. Three separate payments of $32.38 were about to be processed, but I couldn't find a record of them being billed. I couldn't see which payment method I was using so I had to check a few accounts. I received three months of free service when I joined the Dish network, so I don't think that's a problem. It makes sense that I wouldn't have gotten any charges, but I still have three emails saying that I did.
The situation seems a bit ridiculous to be honest. There is a points system for giving feedback on the network, but no online way to change what credit card I pay for the service with. There is a way to report dead spots and network issues with the app. Shouldn't it have been a priority over having table stakes for any kind of service?
VoNR is a technology that can be used to launch a voice network. It is possible to make phone calls on Project Genesis, but most of the time you will be using a partner network. It has been one of the most difficult things to do. It's difficult to get right. We are rolling it out in other places as we improve.
What about the service? You use it on a daily basis, and it's really being tested by Dish. Is the Smart 5G network built and managed using open-sourced radios and software any better than it was before?
The answer is... kind of. Since my article in July, the CellMapper app has spotted a new tower even further east of downtown, which provides coverage to parts of the valley where I had previously been stuck on AT&T. The new towers are in Northtown. It was obvious why my phone was reluctant to connect to the network when it finally did. When I was only a mile away from a tower, I got poor results for 4G and less for 5G.
1
I saw speeds that were faster than I had seen before in other parts of the city. It was able to beat out the deprioritized data in a busy area on a few occasions. On a mediocre day, it did about as well as my Visible phone, and I was able to get the phone to drop off the network even if I only drove.
The lack of consistency is not something I am happy about. My daily carry phone doesn't fluctuate between slow and fast as I drive around, even though other carriers have dead zones.
A little over 1/3.
It's not like Dish isn't aware of its speed issues. One of the places that we got feedback is wanting it to be faster, more reliable.
Deploying more equipment, using more of its own spectrum, and relying on its partners' networks are some of the strategies that Dish has. The more towers it has, the better the coverage. In my area, Dish only uses band n 71, which is good for range and not raw performance, but it has access to several different cellular bands. There is a band called band 70. Even though it is numerically close to 71, n70 is a completely different animal.
The band 70 will help us with speed and throughput. Only a few phones support it, and the S22 doesn't. It wouldn't be a good idea for Project Genesis customers to see n70 from every tower that Dish has.
The company doesn't want its customers to worry about bands, spectrum, or even their towers. Genesis has "seamless coverage," where your phone will connect to other carriers' towers if there aren't any Dish ones nearby. He said that they had heard a lot of positive feedback. The places where people usually experience a dead spot on one network are now working because we are sort of aggregation multiple at the same time. You will be handed off to AT&T or T-Mobile if you are in an area where Dish's coverage isn't available. I haven't noticed my phone connecting to any T-Mobile towers since I left the carrier, but it seems like the system is functioning as intended.
Even if it builds out its network to the point where it could be considered a fourth major US carrier, Dish will still keep its partnerships around. During a conversation about whether the company was planning on posting coverage maps showing where its network is available, I asked if it would consider doing a map in the future.
Our plan is to use the power of multiple 5G networks instead of just leaning on one or the other. The fact that we have great partnerships in the space makes this a strategic advantage. We are building out the first 5G native network, and when you combine that with some of the existing 5G networks that exist in the US, our plan is to provide seamless kind of coverage regardless of where you're at, from a customer's experience."
The strategy is in line with what Dish has been promising. It was advertising that it would combine the power of three networks. It's a bit of an odd strategy, given how much work Dish is going to have to put in to get its coverage to where it's legally required to be
Even though it plans on keeping backups around, it still needs to build its own.
I agree with McCarty that the only people who would really care about which network they use are the people who want to test it and see if it works. The FCC wants to know where the company rolled out its own service.
If it doesn't cover 70% of the US population with its own 5G network by June 14th, it will risk billions of dollars in fines. The carrier does need to deploy a lot of towers in order to provide seamless coverage for its customers. While that process may not be easy for the public to follow, Dish does file maps with the FCC to let the regulators know what is going on.
I asked if it planned on taking a bunch of new cities online at the same time as it did with the original launch. The Project Genesis website still lists the same number of locations as it did when the service was officially launched in June.
The company says it has been covering the cities on that list and in new cities. The company wouldn't say what new areas it's been expanding to. At this time, we are not willing to announce any new markets, but that doesn't mean it's not available If you go through the process on the Project Genesis website, you can connect to the network if you are in one of the new areas.
It is difficult to know what to think about Project Genesis after a few months. On the other hand, I am still impressed by how normal it is to use this phone that has so much weird stuff going on under the hood. I am reminded of the odyssey I had to go on just to get my phone in the first place when I run into a spot where service just doesn't work for some reason.
After my recent round of testing, I was left wondering what Dish had been up to. CellMapper shows that the company has hundreds of towers in other cities, but I haven't seen a lot of evidence to support that. I was able to find many that were first seen a few weeks ago. There is a saying that if you build it, they will come, but I don't think most people will want to spend a lot of time with chat support.
It may be tempting to dismiss Project Genesis as an early adopter tax. The service was launched as a commercial offering, not as a trial. I worry about what this experience will do to the network's reputation before it even has a chance to lift off.
"We want to make sure that when we deploy our VoNR services for our customers, it's really good and it meets up to the expectations of a voice call." I would like the same philosophy to be applied to all of the Project Genesis experience.
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