2021 TPI Aspen Forum: Fireside Keynote with Charlie Ergen

Well, my pleasure. And thanks to Scott and TPI for having me. It's always fun to get up in the mountains in Colorado, and this was a very convenient excuse, so thank you.

No, I don't know anything about it. But I think obviously, all companies, data breaches are a common, too common of an occurrence. And I think telecom networks are specifically really susceptible because obviously the architecture of how we built networks really was 30 years ago, so a lot of things have changed since then. And it's why the government properly is looking at Chinese vendors and other things, because our networks are a little bit insecure. And we'll get into this, but one of the things we're trying to do a little differently is build that in on the front end.

Yeah, I mean, I think our concern would be we have nine million customers on the T-Mobile network today. And having just looked at my cell phone before I got up here, we have not seen anything. So maybe, hopefully, the report is false, but we haven't seen anything. Or whether it may not affect our Boost customers because we may be in a different database. But obviously, to the extent it is, we'll have to deal with it. We have a good team, and we'll deal with it.

Well, I mean, I think we're competitors and they're partners, and we're really competitors. And I think there's things that you would do in the public interest that we just haven't been able to. So it's not particularly healthy. It's in the news. It's not as healthy a relationship as we'd like to see it. Our biggest concern is that we have millions of customers who rely on their network and their CDMA network, and unilaterally T-Mobile said we're going to turn that off on January 1st, and that's going to affect our customers. We first tried to work that out with T-Mobile, and we weren't able to come to any kind of accommodation. They weren't willing to come to any kind of accommodation. The best way to do it is to upgrade networks, but obviously it's a situation where I would expect companies to work together because you have a common objective, which is not to displace consumers. And our Boost customers are some of the most economically disadvantaged consumers. These are customers that the big guys didn't want, didn't necessarily go after, and they're more economically disadvantaged. So I think you have to pay a little special attention to their needs. And it clearly is an anti-competitive effort clearly aimed at Dish. I can give you a real-world example: they're not turning off their 2G network, so they're turning off their 3G network, but they're not turning off the 2G network. Now go figure that out. They're not turning off their Sprint network; they're only turning off the CDMA network, and the only company that it affects as far as I know is Boost and our millions of customers that rely on it. And one more thing: because they're economically depressed, they're not asking for 5G; they're asking for a phone that works, that's economical, and it's dependable. And everybody in this audience knows your 5G phone really doesn't do anything more than your 4G phone does. 5G today is really more of a marketing concept than it is changing anybody's lives. So it's clearly an anti-competitive effort. We paid for those customers; they'd like to have them back. That's good competition, but let's not disrupt customers in the process.

Well, I think first of all, T-Mobile has new leadership, and they're coming on the heels of a very charismatic John Legere. And I think to some degree, they're finding their way. I think with more mature management, you would have worked a path that maybe wasn't as anti-competitive. Because the best way to handle the customers is for both companies to work together. If we go at it individually, they go at it individually, which they're doing today with free phones, which is good for the consumers, and half-price offers, this extraordinary offer. We'll see how that goes, but normally you work together. So the new management, they have to find their role, and I think they're still maturing as a management team. They've looked at the contract and come to the conclusion that per the contract they can do it. Maybe more seasoned management would say, 'They got a huge win from the government when they were able to merge with Sprint. It was very controversial, as many in this audience know. In fact, they got $70 billion of synergy that they've talked to Wall Street about.' And that's why we talk about them internally as being poor winners. It's sometimes hard to be a good winner. And you met that guy in grade school that beat you in something, spiked the ball, stuck his finger in your face. And now they're 1.7 billion in synergy. I think it's just a maturation process. And the Justice Department is looking at it; the FCC certainly has the ability to step in. And just today, the Colorado PUC looked at that and has a show cause hearing for why they may have made false statements or omissions about their shutoff, because they clearly testified under oath that they were going to leave it on for three years. So I prefer to work with them, and I haven't given up hope.

Yeah, I still believe in the deal because I know what we're doing at Dish. So clearly, four competitors in the marketplace is going to be more competitive for the consumer. But I think Sprint was economically challenged, and the competitor for competitors' sake doesn't ultimately scratch the itch. So I think the reason that the attorney general and the administration will be proven correct is that we're going to innovate. We're not just going to compete, but we're going to innovate. We're building a network architected from the ground floor up. It's a greenfield project. We got to architect for the 21st century. Every network in the United States today is a 20th century network built for voice, built for me and you to talk to each other. But the world's changed. We do a couple of really fundamental different things: we adopt O-RAN, which breaks apart the monopoly of the end-to-end solutions that the hardware carriers, whether it be Canada or the Scandinavians, have employed. So things go slow in our networks. And then the biggest breakthrough is that we're going to put our network in the cloud, what we call cloud native, which means it's going to be very modern in how it works. We can use things like machine learning, artificial intelligence to continue to improve the network. We have access to the data, which is great for our enterprise customers. So it's a whole different approach. We're going to innovate in a way that will show up in competition, although it's going to take us a couple years to finish our network.

Yeah, it's not just the FCC and regulators. I think Wall Street, I think most people a year ago, I think almost everybody was skeptical. And the only way you're going to answer skeptics is to just do it. The key for me and the key for our company is to make sure that our employees and our leadership within Dish believe we can do it, and that our vendors and vendor partners believe we can do it. And there we got 100% alignment. So first step: we've publicly announced Las Vegas will be our first market, and the deployment will be done by the end of September. So then we get to turn it on, and then we've got to make it work. We'll be in beta test for at least 90 days while we start putting everything back together and testing and making it work, testing the cloud, and making sure everything works. So the execution risk is still there for sure, and it's a very difficult project. But we've assembled a good team, and we'll come back next year and we can talk about whether the skeptics were right or we were right.

Yeah, so I think the first milestone for us is 20% of the country in June of next year. And no, we haven't—I mean, that's next year, so we're still starting our first city in Las Vegas. We're deploying about 30 cities today. We'll turn them all on between now and then, and that'll be the first milestone. And the skeptics will be fewer. Then the biggest milestone obviously is 70% a year later. And again, we're on track for that. But I've been around business too long to know that you're on track until something happens that you didn't expect. So far, our biggest concerns would be supply chain, which we've seen for the last year, and now maybe they're starting to be with COVID coming back a little bit. We're a little worried about that. But technically, we don't have to invent anything. There's nothing in the laws of physics, nothing in the hardware that really prevents us from doing it. It's just execution and making sure the software works together.

It's going to take 20% of the population. So obviously we'll gear towards the larger cities, and we'll gear towards cities where the regulatory environment is a little easier from a permitting point of view, where maybe they have a little more land and towers that already exist. Like New York City, Chicago, and Los Angeles—those will be three that'll be 2023 for sure, because we need rooftops and it just takes longer to go through the permitting. But you can imagine that the Southwest, the South, certainly parts of the Midwest, are areas where there's a very good tower infrastructure that we can get to a little quicker.

Well, I think the good news is our deployment team ordered ahead, and we planned for more than 20%. So we have had supply disruptions, but if they don't get any worse, we're on track to get there. The biggest supply disruption we've had has been handsets. Vietnam has been shut down where a lot of the handsets are made. LG exited the business, and we don't have the scale of the other big three incumbents to punch our way above for supply. So that's certainly been an issue. And certainly part of the problem with the CDMA shutoff will take a little longer because we have been on allocation for some of our supply.

There always is that risk. And certainly the first thing we do at staff every morning is look and see whether we've had any issues. But right now, I can say we're on track, and we'll just have to keep our fingers crossed.

Well, it does three things. First of all, it breaks apart the radio and the baseband processing, and that's controlled by the Chinese vendors and Nokia and Ericsson in the United States. So if you want to make a change, you have to go to Nokia and Ericsson, and it takes them a while because a lot of their software has to be compatible with 4G, 3G, 2G, and everything else. So it makes innovation slow and costly. When you break that apart, it allows you to buy baseband processing from one vendor and buy radios from any multiple number of vendors. So we have a couple partners on the baseband side today and a couple partners on the radio side, with more to come. So we have more choice, which reduces cost. Second thing it does is you're able to use an eCPRI and what we call an x-split, in our case it's a 7.2x split, which means that our radios can talk to each other without having to go back to the core, so more efficiently. And the third thing—and no analyst has ever picked up on this yet—the other thing it does is we're able to use the RIC, the radio intelligent controller, and use software there that we can start treating everybody on our network differently. For example, somebody going 60 miles down the highway is different than somebody using a phone here. But networks today are not intelligent in that sense; everybody in terms of the network is kind of treated the same no matter what you're doing. And of course traffic patterns are different during the day. By using that intelligence and being in the cloud and using machine learning and artificial intelligence, we can start becoming a much more efficient network, which saves cost, and we can innovate. So we're building something materially different. I've said this publicly many times: we're building Netflix in a Blockbuster world. It's not that Blockbuster didn't work; it did. But all Netflix did was take all that video from a Blockbuster store and stick it in the cloud. As soon as they did that, the world changed. Suddenly you didn't have late charges—that's a pretty good consumer feature. Suddenly you could take your TV with you wherever you went, including my hotel room here. So the world changed. And suddenly you could make a change to your whole network overnight and produce a different feature for your customers. You can't do that in networks today. And that's what we're building. And that's why ultimately people will say that the merger of Sprint and T-Mobile, I think, will ultimately be proven to be a good regulatory decision, although a lot of it depends on us executing and being successful. If not, then if we can't make it, Sprint probably wasn't going to make it either.

I think that's a fair point. And we know the systems today work. And my hats are off to Verizon, AT&T, and T-Mobile because when COVID hit us 18 months ago, their networks were challenged in a way that none of them expected in a very short period of time, and they came through that. First of all, they busted their tails to make things work, but they—our networks held up surprisingly well. Having said that, the legacy of the way their networks are built just can't take us to where we need to go. And where we need to go is not just about consumers; it's also about our industrial, it's about our national security, it's about industrial production and being efficient in how we manufacture, it's about how we connect things in a more efficient way with the data to affect things like healthcare, or affect things like climate change, or affect things like education. And that's where the wireless industry needs to go. I would only say this: our vendor partners believe that it is—I think Amazon is a good partner that knows a lot about telco today and cloud. I think Dell, as you mentioned, knows a lot. I think VMware knows a lot about it. I think Palo Alto knows a lot about security. And Altiostar and Mavenir are new incumbents that people haven't heard about that are building this baseband. Fujitsu builds great radios for us.

Altiostar and Mavenir. And these are US companies. It's depressing—we gave away our industry 30 years ago. We gave it to the Chinese, we gave it to the Scandinavians. We gave away our whole infrastructure because they had lower cost of production or whatever reason we decided to do that. And I think it's important from a national security point of view and from a connectivity point of view that we regain some of that. For the most part, all of our vendors are US. We do use Nokia for part of our core, and we do use Fujitsu for radios. But there's going to be—Congress has recognized that in the infrastructure bill, there's a billion and a half dollars for O-RAN grants, and I think another $500 million to NTIA. So people are starting to recognize that. And as our administration goes around the world and people say, 'We don't want you to use the Chinese vendors,' the first thing they say is, 'What's the alternative?' And they say, 'Well, there's Nokia and Ericsson or whoever.' And they say, 'Well, they're too expensive and they don't work as good.' And I think the United States, if we're successful, then the United States will have something else for people to look at.

I don't know enough about it to be an expert, but I know that networks are vulnerable, extremely vulnerable. And we know that in the United States, we have something called legal intercept that we know the government does. And we know that when you have an end-to-end system, the way our team says, when you have vendor lock-in, then your whole network's in the dark. So if the Chinese network's in the dark, then you can get the cockroach in there. And when you open it up like we are with O-RAN, the cockroach still can get in there, but the light's on so you can see it. In an end-to-end control system, the cockroach is there and you don't know it's there. So I think a lot of what worries us in the United States is there are probably cockroaches in all the networks; we just can't see them. So we've tried to build that security on the front end. We'll have our challenges, but we've got great security vendors led by Palo Alto, but there are others. And we're building that on the front end. Most networks, when you just had voice calls, there was very little security built in.

Well, I think the key is to work together and make sure that you're—we've asked for it, we're open to help. So we hope companies or countries both—I like the partnership with government when it comes to security. So we're open to suggestion, and we're happy to share what we're doing. And certainly, as people learn about what we're doing and obviously they may know what the incumbents do better than I do, then you start finding out how you get down that path to better security. But I don't think there's any question that an open system in the cloud can be a more secure system than a closed-in system.

I assume most people know that we entered into a 10-year agreement for an MVNO deal with AT&T. So it's a moderately advantageous business partnership between both. For AT&T, they're getting at least $5 billion from us. They certainly will get—they'll be our primary MVNO partner, so they'll get the majority of our new customers as they sign up, and from their competitors. So it's obviously modestly beneficial to them. For us, we get a maybe more willing partner and we get a better network. Our customers want—and I think most customers—want a very dependable network and they want coverage. So AT&T works pretty well in Aspen and rural parts of rural America. Our T-Mobile network hasn't worked as well. So we now can go deeper into the American population for customers, particularly since in satellite television we have more rural customers where the T-Mobile network today is still lacking. So it's moderately beneficial to both of us. It could be quite a bit more than that. We have some shared interest: we both have mirror images of 700 megahertz. Maybe you don't need to both build that out; maybe you can share some infrastructure cost. We both have an interest in 12 gigahertz because we use it for satellite. We think that's a fantastic frequency for terrestrial. So we have some shared interest there. They would like to use some of our frequencies that we haven't built out yet, particularly places like Los Angeles and Chicago, which I'm sure will take longer. So I think there are a lot of things that you could do that are beneficial to both parties but don't harm the competition between the two. And we see a little of that in Canada where people share networks; we see that in the UK. I think we're starting to see where the government shares frequencies now. So I think you're going to start seeing more of the sharing because the capital costs are so great. And if you can do that and build a better product, I think the consumer wins. So I think there's more we could do, but those things aren't settled yet. It'll depend on how their relationship goes.

Well, we petitioned the FCC to do a public notice rulemaking on 12 gigahertz. It's a frequency that we use for satellite from a geostationary point of view. We purchased a lot of the country. Michael Dell owns part of the country, or his company does, in an auction for terrestrial use. And then the NGSOs, the non-geostationary, so the LEOs, also would like to use that frequency. So we spent five years asking for the FCC to take a look at it. And the impossible takes a little longer sometimes. But we're pleased that the chairman did that last year. So now that's up for public notice. And we think the spectrum has a lot of use in mobile and wireless, and we think it can be used by satellite guys as well. So we're hopeful that again, this is one of those things where adults in a room sometimes can solve a problem. But my experience has been sometimes that doesn't happen. And hopefully the FCC doesn't have to make some tough decisions there. But it's a great frequency that can impact how we do broadband and how we lead in mobile in the United States.

Yeah, I mean, I start with good government matters. So not just the FCC, but all our regulatory agencies, including the executive branch and Congress. Good government matters. We don't want to be Venezuela; we don't want to be Cuba. Good policy makes—our company is a result of good policy. So we want to get in the satellite business and do DBS and become the first company in the world to do digital compression and impact the MPEG-2 standard. It required the government to allocate spectrum even though people were skeptical. It required Congress to pass a law that says cable companies can't stop you from carrying programming that they have an interest in. People don't remember, but the cable companies owned at least a portion of all the programmers back then, and they wouldn't sell to us. So it took good government policy to allow us even to get into the business and make the ultimate billions of dollars investment we did. So my experience with the FCC has been that to a person on the FCC, they've been willing to listen to us, they've been willing to take meetings. Chair Rosenworcel has been there a long time; she's extremely smart, she knows policy. But they're a little bit—obviously with a 2-2 commission, they're probably not going to engage in anything controversial. And obviously we would encourage the administration to name a fifth commissioner so that there can be a majority and move some of the policies forward that are probably a little more controversial. So our experience has been we've benefited from the FCC at times, and we've been maybe too hit—we've been punished by the FCC. I mean, we've gotten some rulings that almost put us out of business and we still suffer from today. But we've also been the beneficiaries of that. So it's been a mixed bag for us, and we're appreciative of the times when they've supported us.

Well, I think I'd say this way: good decisions are made with good data. So the more information you have, the more data you have—which is why I think things like public notices are good—then I think you can make better decisions. When they become a zero-sum game between people, you try to get the people ahead to come out with compromise. Businesses know how to compromise; they know how to give to get. It's just sometimes—and again, I was probably one of those guys 30 years ago—but sometimes you decide it's a zero-sum game and you have to win everything to be a winner, and sometimes you don't. So I think obviously this administration, net neutrality will be something that they might look at differently than previous administrations. I think they've certainly got to focus on making sure that broadband can get out as deep as we can to every American, because that affects—it's like electricity, as one commissioner said at one time. So I think they'll have—I think there's probably a bit more scrutiny of mergers and acquisitions. I think those are the things we expect to see.

I'm not worried about antitrust. I mean, I think that should some people in this audience be worried about antitrust? Probably. I don't know—we don't have much money to be—we wouldn't show up on the screen. But some people in this audience have a lot of money. And I think that what happens when companies get big, they start doing things that are to stay big. So they always start out with competition, and the bigger you get, you always start getting around the edges. So I think there's probably things that I'm not particularly expert on. And I don't see tons of things that are anti-competitive as far as our company is concerned, but we do see things around the edges.

Well, I think they are coming together, just blending and blurring together. I think what you'd like to see is a level playing field. So you want to make sure that—and some of this stuff has been in the paper—but an app store, is that a level playing field? Well, maybe it is, maybe it isn't. Is advertising a level playing field? Are some people regulated and some people unregulated? So I think the internet hasn't been as regulated as some other things. So they believe that's going to change or should change. I again would say to the extent there's not a level playing field, people ought to look at it. And that'd be my only principle: have a level playing field, let the strong survive. And again, we're a product of that. The cable companies had positions in the programmers, and they said, 'We do not want competition. You cannot sell to Dish because they're going to launch a satellite, and you can't sell to them and carry the programming.' Regulators stepped in—actually, it was Congress that stepped in. And that was good government; we wouldn't exist. So are there things like that today? Yeah, I mean, I think Comcast probably faces some of that challenge on certain things. And on the other hand, they benefit from the broadband business where they have basically—they may be the single source in many places. So that's for regulators to look at. I'll focus on our business. I think obviously one of the things we think would be an interesting regulatory thing is a merger between Dish and DirecTV. I've called that inevitable. And I think there are obviously two sides to every coin, but for us to survive in the video business when we now compete with the very people who give us the programming, and we have to compete with them—this isn't any kind of three to two or four to three or two to one kind of situation. This is a situation it's 30 to 29 or something. And the world is different than when we tried to do that 20 years ago. So that would be one that I think would be really interesting because I think the world has changed so differently. The regulators would look at that differently than they did 20 years ago. But that's probably the one that's top of mind for our company.

No, I don't think that has anything to do with it. I think the fact that we're just not getting any new subs—everybody who wants a satellite dish in America has one. And so we're obviously churning to the OTT providers that have hundreds of millions now. I think there are three or four companies that have over 100 million together. I think we have 30 million, maybe not even 30 million, maybe 22 million or something like that. So I think the fact that the marketplace has kind of spoken is the real reason. TPG now obviously has completed their acquisition of controlling interest, or at least management control, of DirecTV. So they obviously would have the big say in that. But when it comes to odds, I said it's inevitable. So I don't know what that is—100%? It may be because one or both companies are bankrupt, but it's inevitable because at some point you can't justify it. You can't justify the investment in a new satellite today, so they're going to run out of fuel. And there's still going to be some people who prefer the satellite TV experience. I'm one of them. I like to be able to skip commercials. I'm proud of the fact that this company took on Hollywood and the broadcasters to automatically skip commercials. I was on the front cover with devil's horns as the most hated man in Hollywood. We're okay with that.

Yeah, I have—by the way, I just want to be clear. I'm old school. I don't think you can spend more money than you take in. But you can look at a long time frame of that, but you can't spend more money than you take in. So I think that it's not been true for the last 10 years. The time frame could be 10 years or longer. Certainly the US government has been 60 years or something. So I don't know how long the time frame, but I don't think the economic model has changed. Your value of your company is the net present value of your cash flow. That hasn't changed. So the only difference is what time frame you take a look at. Some companies Wall Street allows to take a little bit longer time frame. Certainly they've had confidence in Amazon to take a longer time frame; they've had confidence in Uber to take a longer time frame. So that really is the key. But you ultimately have to get a return on your investment, or you'll be roadkill.

Well, I think it's what good companies do. I would just advise: think about the consumer experience and go from the consumer experience. So let the consumer—when in doubt, go with the consumer. That may affect your bottom line a little bit one way or the other short term or long term. But in our case, in satellite TV, it's not as good an experience as it should be. We have 18 minutes of commercials in an hour. My kids won't watch it; it's unwatchable. And we're competing against commercial-free TV, or you want to skip things, or you want to search things, or you want to—so I think content providers just need to make their content more consumable by the consumer, easier. And I think a lot of them have done it. Netflix is probably the gold standard of that; they made their product very easy to consume with not a lot of friction. So I think everybody will learn that. And the internet's a little bit different. It's nice for consumers because you can kind of jump in and jump out every month, so churn is higher, and that's a good consumer feature. We'll have to work our way through it. But I think on satellite television, I'd love to see content make our product a little bit better. Our customers get to skip those commercials, so they get to watch 60 minutes in 40 minutes, but not everybody can do that.

Wow, there's a lot. When I started out, to this day, it was Rupert Murdoch and John Malone, because those were the guys—and Ted Turner. Those were kind of the guys. And I probably spent a little bit more time with Mr. Murdoch, and I got to know him. And I was amazed at the common—and today, that is probably Jeff at Amazon. And I think certainly Netflix, in terms of what they did, they showed real courage, they thought long term, they went against where—I remember when Netflix wasn't supposed to—they got punished for getting out of the DVD business. But he's going to order DVDs by mail; we all know that. So they got punished on that one. So the thing that I admire and the thing that I try to teach as part of our culture at Dish is curiosity. And the one thing that I've noticed—I'm lucky that I get to see a lot of people who have been successful, and I keep saying, 'Why are these people successful?' Over the years, I've come to the conclusion that these people are curious and they're lifelong learners. Because they're lifelong learners, they just end up with more data at their disposal before they make decisions; they make better decisions. Now, I don't think it's that hard to know where the telco industry is going, but it's analyzed by how many handset users you have. So I think curiosity is the key for what I look at. And I just think that is a common thread between those people you read about that are really successful.

Well, the one I think is The Innovator's Dilemma, because what that really says is you have to compete against yourself; you have to reinvent yourself because if you don't, somebody else will. And that's why DVDs—that was such a courageous thing by Reed and team to go from DVDs to streaming. We looked at that business, and all our engineers got together and said, 'This doesn't make any sense. It costs a dollar to download a movie, but you can't make any money at it.' He was smart enough to realize it was going to cost one-tenth of one cent to do it. But they looked ahead at the future cost. It probably wasn't that hard to predict that it was going to go down, but they did it while they had a very successful business. That's where the courage came in. And then the courage to also go into programming.

You know, I don't know. I mean, where did you—I'm not knocking. What's my fault? What if you guys look at what does that mean? It wasn't their fault; it was my fault. Because I didn't ask probing enough questions. I knew costs went down; I knew costs were going to go down because I'd seen it in my own business. So that was on me. When was that? And I still have a job. So you're going to make mistakes, and you just have to do the goldfish thing they talk about on Ted—you just got to forget it and move on. That's another thing that leaders do.

And so I think that's a goldfish. Is that the name of your biography? I'm not doing a biography. Why not? You should. I can't. No, it would not be interesting. I mean, I've done the same thing for 40-something years in business, which is to try to build something and look ahead where we think things are going, and then go build, and then adjust along the way when things don't go exactly the way you thought they were going to go. And then hope like heck you get lucky. And we've been fortunate. There's always going to be that moment in your business where it could go either way. For us, when we've kind of met that moment—I mean, we're on a Chinese rocket for 20 minutes of a controlled explosion that could have gone either way, and it went our way. So you got to have that. There's a lot of people who had great businesses that just got unlucky or had bad timing. Our time is a lot of luck. So one of the things that I'm most proud of as a company is that as we started to get into the wireless business, we thought we were going to start with LTE in 4G. And there's a place where we got hung up in H block and a couple things with the FCC, so we didn't have it. Actually, it put us in a position that we couldn't meet the timing curve of technology; we had to wait for the next timing, which was 5G. And I'm very proud of the fact that everybody wanted us to build out—regulators, Congress, everybody wanted us to build a 4G network. And we had a moment where they thought about putting us out of business and taking our licenses back. But we would have been out of business if we built a 4G network. So we held on to our courage and said, 'We know we're going to build something that really makes a difference.' And now whether we execute or not is another story, but we're building something special, and we'll build something the FCC is going to be proud of. And I think that was one of our finest moments.

Uh, I don't know. Gone with the Wind? I can't even say I watched that now. But I think I did as a kid.

Oh, is this broadband or is this—broadband infrastructure. I think the FCC has done a better job of this now, but I'm a foundation guy. The first thing you got to know is you got to get real maps of broadband. You got to know who's got it and who doesn't. And I'm telling you, you call up Comcast and say, 'You're not getting a nickel till you tell us the truth under penalty of perjury of who you serve and who you don't, what your real speeds are.' You can call up us at Dish; we serve everybody 100%. Here's our—we can tell you that tomorrow pretty easy. So using Rhett Butler-era maps for what we should be doing in the 21st—how do you spend $100 billion if you don't? You end up with very inefficient, wasteful spending, and you get overbuilding, you get stuff that doesn't go the right way. So that's the first thing. Then I think you got to be technology neutral. You have to say we're not going to pick a particular technology; we're going to be a little neutral on how we do that. And the third thing is that when you build the maps, every home in the United States has an economic way to build it. So if you're very, very rural, if you're that house back in the woods on a generator, satellite is probably the only way to get there. And things like Hughes, which we own, and ViaSat are doing a good job with that. Then there's fixed wireless. You get a little denser, like maybe part of Aspen here on the hillside, then fixed wireless is probably the most cost-effective. And the mobile guys are now with C-band spectrum coming, and others. And then for more densely populated areas, fiber is probably the way to go. And I think once you get the maps, that'll be fairly obvious. And then I would go faster rather than slower. So even if I didn't have fiber to a place, I thought I could get fiber six or seven years from now, I'd want to get them hooked up to fixed wireless or satellite, and then I'll come back in and get them fiber. But ultimately, I think where we end up is where you have electricity, you're going to have fiber. I think that's kind of the end goal, and that's probably a 20-year process. But we can get everybody broadband in the meantime so that the kids can get educated, they can do Zoom calls, and we can do it sooner rather than later. But you got to start with knowledge of who you're dealing with, because otherwise—the way it works, I can't make this up—the way it works now in the boardrooms, everybody's saying, 'How do we get the government money?' And then they spend weeks and months, and probably half of this audience are hired by them, 'How do we get the money?' It'd be nice if we sat in the boardroom and said, 'How do we serve the customer?' And then we'll go ask for the money. That's just not the way it's working in reality. So it wouldn't be bad if the government also said, 'How do we serve the customer?' Given that taxpayers are the customer. That's why you got to start—I wouldn't grant the first dollar until you showed me—the RDOF thing, which we participated in, was a perfect example. People won government subsidies, and there is not a physical building or human being in the territory in the census unit. That's ridiculous. Did that just—as a taxpayer, I don't know what that is. I'm sorry, I should know. It was an auction, a reverse auction, which was very brilliant on how to provide government subsidies to provide broadband to customers. The problem was you get paid for up on top of that hillside where there's nobody there. And then there were places that needed it that didn't get that money; it went somewhere else. And that's been pointed out by many in the press, and people have looked at that. The FCC is doing the right thing because hopefully without penalty, they'll let people turn in those places where they got money they shouldn't have. And I hope companies are responsible and do it. But the rules are the rules, so they can go by the rules. But I hope people will be responsible on that. That's a perfect example.

No, Ajax is way too hard for me. Yeah, that's too steep.