Boost Mobile effectively hung up on its ambitions to become the fourth wireless carrier in the US today with the news that it will sell much of its spectrum holdings to AT&T.
The firm that Sprint spun off as a condition of T-Mobile buying that carrier in 2020 will sell licenses for spectrum in the 600MHz and 3.45GHz bands to AT&T for about $23 billion. AT&T can lease the spectrum for its use before the transaction closes, pending regulatory approval.
That payday can address the cash crunch at Boost’s parent firm, EchoStar, which recently warned investors that it has “substantial doubt about our ability to continue as a going concern.” It also promises to relieve a regulatory headache at the FCC, where Chair Brendan Carr has been questioning Boost’s holding of large swaths of unused spectrum.
But EchoStar and AT&T’s announcements make it clear that this deal will end Boost’s trajectory to become a fourth nationwide carrier after AT&T, T-Mobile, and Verizon—the hope of regulators who blessed T-Mobile’s takeover of Sprint—and leave it locked in AT&T’s orbit.
“Let’s face it, it’s the end of the fourth carrier,” says Roger Entner, founder and lead analyst at Recon Analytics. “It’s not happening.”
EchoStar’s press release says Boost will become a “hybrid” mobile network operator (MNO) combining the greenfield 5G network that it’s been lighting up since 2022 with AT&T’s, which reaches far more of the country.
“Through Boost Mobile’s hybrid MNO infrastructure, subscribers will continue to receive service from Boost Mobile’s cloud-native 5G core connected to AT&T’s leading nationwide network,” that statement reads. “As a result of this transaction, elements of Boost Mobile’s radio access network (RAN) will be decommissioned over time.”
Boost’s press office did not answer an email sent Tuesday morning requesting more details on how this transition would work for existing Boost subscribers.
‘It Can’t Be Business As Usual’
The big three will continue to face competition from mobile virtual network operators (MVNOs) that resell their networks, often at lower prices. But the carriers themselves now own many of these resellers; see, for instance, T-Mobile’s purchase of Mint Mobile in 2024.
The CEO of one of the few independently run MNVOs, who earlier founded Boost Mobile itself, called for the FCC to protect competition before approving this transaction. “If this deal is approved, it can’t be business as usual with recycled promises about Boost’s future,” MobileX CEO Peter Adderton said in a post on X. “The FCC needs to put real protections and wholesale rules in place so independent MVNOs can compete.”
AT&T’s announcement, meanwhile, pitched increased competition in the home broadband market from its plan to use this spectrum to “accelerate and expand availability” of the Internet Air 5G broadband service that it began rolling out in 2023.
Fixed wireless access (FWA) has become the fastest-growing category of broadband and one of the most liked. But AT&T, which earlier focused on building out fiber broadband, has trailed both Verizon and T-Mobile’s home 5G services in reach and subscribers.
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“Until now, AT&T has been much more cautious about FWA than either Verizon or T-Mobile,” the market-research firm MoffettNathanson wrote in a post on Tuesday.
Analysts Craig Moffett and Nick Del Deo rated the Boost Mobile deal as “a negative” for cable broadband providers and, to the extent that AT&T can persuasively bundle FWA with its mobile service, “an incremental negative” for its rivals T-Mobile and Verizon.
AT&T’s announcement says the company plans to bring Internet Air to future markets for AT&T Fiber, so that it can sign up customers now for wireless and try to upsell them on its faster wired service later. “This acquisition bolsters and expands our spectrum portfolio while enhancing customers’ 5G wireless and home internet experience in even more markets,” the AT&T announcement quotes chairman and CEO John Stankey.
Recon Analytics’ Entner noted that the capacity of the 3.45GHz spectrum that AT&T is buying from Boost should work well for fixed wireless. “It’s a lot of midband spectrum,” he said. “It’s another front that they can open up against cable.”
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What Does This Mean for EchoStar?
The forecast doesn’t look nearly as bright for EchoStar, which had met a series of FCC deadlines to build out its 5G network, the first to be built on an Open RAN (Radio Access Network) architecture that allows mixing components from different network vendors. We tested Boost’s 5G service around Manhattan this spring and found it impressively fast.
“I’m enormously proud of the EchoStar team for deploying the world’s first Open RAN network in record time, despite industry skepticism and in the face of the many challenges raised by the COVID-19 pandemic,” EchoStar co-founder and chairman Charlie Ergen said in a statement.
MoffettNathanson commended EchoStar for getting AT&T to overpay for those licenses, but didn’t see Boost enduring as a network operator. “More spectrum sales will surely follow, and if today’s transaction is any indication, those, too, could fetch more than we had imagined,” MoffettNathanson’s note predicted. “The likelihood of EchoStar remaining a facilities-based wireless carrier [is] dwindling.”
Entner, however, suggested that Ergen, a veteran and aggressive dealmaker in the satellite and telecom industries, could succeed with a cut-down wireless business built on Boost’s more urban 5G network. “He can offload all the expensive traffic, which is rural, onto the AT&T network, and he can do all the cheap traffic on his own network,” he said before adding this warning: “That doesn’t solve Boost’s inability to sell its service.”
Beyond Boost, EchoStar also runs the Sling TV streaming-TV service, the Dish Network satellite TV service, and the Hughesnet satellite-broadband service. And it plans to launch a low-Earth-orbit satellite-broadband service to compete with SpaceX’s Starlink and others.
“How many satellite broadband services do we need?” Entner asked skeptically about that upcoming EchoStar venture, which would be the fourth in the US after Starlink, Amazon’s Project Kuiper, and AST SpaceMobile (a partner of AT&T and Verizon). “We can’t support four carriers in the wireless market, which is far larger than the satellite broadband market.”
Enter’s assessment of EchoStar’s newest satellite ambitions could also apply to Boost’s goal of building a fourth network from scratch: “Great idea; reality stands in the way.”
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About Rob Pegoraro
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