Nearly one year after Dish Network agreed to acquire Sprint's prepaid assets from T-Mobile, the deal has officially been done.
Dish confirmed today that it has acquired Boost Mobile and entered the US wireless market. With its $1.4 billion acquisition of Boost, Dish has more than 9 million total customers. Dish has put its COO, John Swieringa, in charge of Boost and also rolled out a new Boost Mobile logo that you can see above.
As part of this sort of re-launch of Boost Mobile, Dish will roll out two new plans. The first is a $hrink-It! plan that was actually offered by Boost way back in the day, having been discontinued in July 2014. It starts at $45 for 15GB and that price drops by $5 after 3 on-time payments and then drops by another $5 after 6 total on-time payments.
Both of these plans will be available from Boost Mobile starting tomorrow, July 2nd.
And then there's the network. Dish doesn't currently have a network of its own, so as part of its agreement with T-Mobile, Dish and its customers will have access to the T-Mo network for 7 years. During that time, Dish will build out its own standalone 5G network.
In addition to its acquisition of Boost Mobile, Dish's agreement with T-Mobile will see it spending $3.6 billion on nationwide 800MHz spectrum that previously belonged to Sprint. This will help Dish to build out its own network.
Dish is required to deploy a 5G network that covers 70 percent of the US population by June 14, 2023. If it doesn't meet that goal, it'll have to pay $2.2 billion to the US Treasury. So Dish has some work to do over the next 3 years.