Dish is getting better day by day—but it's still not quite good enough for anyone but early adopters.
The first new nationwide wireless carrier in 20-plus years, Dish launched its 5G network in mid-June under the "Project Genesis" moniker. The company serves more than 120 mostly small and mid-sized cities, offering only the Galaxy S22 phone, in what our earlier analysis showed is really an open beta of a network that's very much under construction.
"Project Genesis" aims to be rebranded as "Boost Infinite" later this year, with better coverage and more phone options, and that will probably be when people should jump on board.
Two weeks ago, I headed to three upstate New York cities—Ithaca, Syracuse, and Utica—to find that Dish was starting to turn on towers, but was also direly constrained in terms of capacity. The whole network was running on just 5MHz of band n71 airwaves, not enough to handle mass adoption.
Over the week of July 4, I returned to Ithaca, NY, and also took some samples in nearby Binghamton, another Dish city. In Binghamton, I found good news: Dish had turned on 20MHz of band n66 to supplement band n71, raising download speeds to 112-150Mbps. Uploads were still going over the n71 spectrum, so they were 3-12Mbps.
Ithaca wasn't showing the additional n66 yet, but I found some good news there, too: Parts of downtown and the West Hill neighborhood that didn't show Dish 5G two weeks previously were now showing Dish 5G coverage.
On the maps below, green is Dish 5G. Other colors show various modes of the phone running on AT&T's network, which is what the phone falls back to when it doesn't hit Dish native coverage.
Dish, Day By Day
At the moment, Dish is making the best of a bad spectrum situation. Many of its airwaves are in a frequency band called n70, which current phones don't support. We saw some Motorola phones pass through the FCC earlier this year with n70, but we haven't seen them on the market yet. Dish says n70-compatible phones are coming later this year.
That leaves Dish with a smidgen of long-range, low-capacity n71 and some supplementary n66. With relatively few people on the network right now, it can deliver decent performance with the two combined, but there are big questions around whether that's scalable.
Early adopters who want to play with something new (at $30 for unlimited use, along with a discounted, $399 Galaxy S22 phone) can join Project Genesis on its Web site. Everyone else should probably wait for Boost Unlimited.