Third Bridge专家称EchoStar重组后更像资产处置型公司，Boost与Hughes增长前景承压

[[00:01:06]]
The big news here is the filing of Chapter 11 by Dish DBS, EchoStar's subsidiary, in June 2026, basically kicking the company into a complete reorganisation. On a high level, what is this business going to look like as it transitions?

[[00:01:45]]
If we look back a year, I mean, EchoStar was very much a facilities-based company, very capital-intensive. It was building out a terrestrial wireless network and it also signed contracts to build out a new satellite network. It was looking at a lot of things. Then with the FCC beginning to look into the terrestrial wirelesses and perhaps saying that you're not really using them, EchoStar took quite a divergent path and then all of a sudden was selling off its assets and shutting down the RAN or the radio access network part of the terrestrial wireless business. Then also subsequently sold off the S-Band to SpaceX. There was terrestrial nationwide spectrum that was sold to AT&T and then spectrum was sold to SpaceX, which really kicked off a pivot within the company in terms of what it was doing and who it needed to do it. That has continued to roll and the strategy that EchoStar used to shut down the radio access network was contentious, I think, is a good word.

The other parties related to that network in terms of the tower owners and folks who are involved in operating the radio access part of the network certainly did not see it as being what EchoStar termed a force majeure event when the FCC came to investigate their licences. I think that anyone who gets into business with EchoStar needs to be very cognisant that it has quite a strong leader in Charlie Ergen. The move of certain parts of the company into Chapter 11 is just another aspect that Charlie is using to extract value out of the company. I think ultimately, that's the medium-to-long game that he's playing. The short term is put the issues of lawsuits and so on that are making claims on EchoStar's value into a place where they either get decided at a very low cost and meaning that when anybody sues, you've got two parties, one is suing, one is defending, both have costs.

In this scenario, I think they're using that as a cost containment mechanism to delay, defer or perhaps even deny some of those claims. It doesn't necessarily mean that some of those assets that they won't end up owning them, I think that's also a part of the potential plan and all this was preplanned. It's quite a tumultuous year in terms of what they've been doing, but I think it will continue until the company becomes a much more stable and effectively what is an asset-light company from what was an asset-heavy company.

[[00:05:33]]
You mentioned Charlie Ergen, and it's impossible to have this conversation without him. He's been chairman of EchoStar for a while. The CEO has been Hamid Akhavan for a while, but he resigned abruptly in July 2026. Charlie is stepping back into the fold as CEO. Do you see any significance there, or do you think that at the end of the day, Charlie was already running the show?

[[00:06:12]]
I would say Charlie is always running the show. He's not a hands-off guy. You could view it perhaps as he needed an extra pair of hands to manage some of the activities. I mean when Hamid came on board, the 8-K filings basically said one of his jobs was to merge EchoStar and Dish back together again, which is what he did. There could have just been a number of reasons that he needed somebody else to come on board. The fact that I think after the sale of the spectrum, Hamid was initially put to one side in terms of who's going to be the CEO of EchoStar Capital, I think it was called. It sounded like they were going to begin to go out and invest in various other things. Now he's gone. It seems like perhaps that was just a holding pattern in the short term. He's certainly came in. He certainly made a lot of money, but I think at the end of the day because Charlie is a majority shareholder and is actively involved in the business, all the major decisions were Charlie's. There was very few things that I think were solely would have been Hamid's.

[[00:07:45]]
You mentioned that EchoStar is going back to the asset-light model, no longer looking at a capital-intensive terrestrial network build-out. What does that look like going forwards? Is there anything beyond Boost Mobile being an MVNO [mobile virtual network operator] again? Is that basically what EchoStar looks like over the medium term? We also have the Lyra constellation that the company has been working on, and we'll see how that plays out. What does this model look like to you?

[[00:08:34]]
Let's break down as to what's left. The S-band that was sold in the US also went with the S-band, the global satellite S-band, which basically was the end of any programme related to Lyra. That enables SpaceX to go off and build its global D2D network is that satellite S-band both within the US, which is a very scarce asset and the S-band outside of the US globally used under the Sirion filing through Australia. That piece has gone. There's no D2D network that's going to be owned. The RAN part of Boost was shut down. That piece has gone. What's left is the core network part of Boost, so in the retail side. There's also Dish TV, which is a satellite TV network. I guess also with the Dish TV, there's this sort of sister company, Sling, which is the IP streaming platform, and then also there's Hughes Network Systems. Then there's a bunch of remaining terrestrial wireless licences as well. I think maybe starting with the licences, they've already said they're planning on selling these by about I think September 2028 or something like that. They've come up with a process to get rid of them because they basically don't have any real use for them.

I think that that will be another cash-generative activity. I think Boost will be an entity that I think remains and potentially remains as an operating entity that they can hang other businesses off. I mean, obviously, they have a relationship with SpaceX from the licence sale. There was some talk there of D2D and then also within the broadband capability of reselling that, so maybe there's some linkage there. That piece, I would think would remain. The Dish TV, and that's been on again, off again for, I don't know, how many years, it seems like decades now of merger with DirecTV. In the past, it failed because people were like, oh, no, it's too much consolidation and it failed for antitrust reasons. The last time it was attempted, I think it failed because the bondholders didn't like the asset squeeze. I think now there would unlikely to be any antitrust issues because of streaming. Also there probably are benefits to both sets of shareholders in terms of consolidation there and the declining number of subscribers leads to, hey, you need to consolidate. That business isn't going to grow. You can also potentially eliminate CAPEX and so on.

I don't think it's going to happen immediately. I think that's probably 1-2 years out. I would imagine that the private equity firm, I think it's TPG that owns DirecTV is obviously having discussions with EchoStar about that. Then leads on to Hughes and Hughes is in a tough spot. I mean, its primary competitor, SpaceX, has taken the consumer market away from them. I think that they have to think about what they want to do there, either they need to become much more compete in the consumer space or decide that the enterprise government space is going to be enough for them to continue to operate that satellite and generate a return on its investment. Right now, I think it's not very clear. They've definitely retreated to government and enterprise on that satellite. I mean, possible synergies with Viasat who's in a similar position, so it's another consolidation play potentially.

In some aspects, when you've got a very defined fixed capacity for, say, a cell site or a broadband site where it's not moving and it's a large data stream and it needs to be managed in a way with quality of service and SLAs, GEO is better than LEO. However, that strategy, I think, maybe has a timer on it. We're going to see Amazon Leo come in and their first target is government and enterprise with SLAs, quality of service. That's their core target. Also, it's going to see SpaceX in that same space, too. They either have to decide they're going to compete and how they're going to compete, but they can't just say, oh, we're going to compete with this sector because that's the better customer. Maybe having Charlie come back into that side of the business, he might be open to doing something very aggressive in terms of pricing and services. Certainly, Hughes has a strong engineering capability. That might be attractive to some defence contractors, perhaps, more government.

I mean, there's an option there to split up the company a little bit with the government and aviation potentially being spun out. I would say there's also an option there to just spin the whole of Hughes out to a private equity company that could reorganise and rationalise Hughes in a way that hasn't really been done in a long, long time. There's quite a lot of options there. That's part of the problem. There's a lot of things to do. I think EchoStar will have to go through things logically and chronologically in order. The problems with dealing with Hughes, dealing with Dish TV, that can all come later. I think they have to get through, obviously, all the bankruptcy stuff first, get things on a level playing field and then perhaps deal with those two. Then finally, it's what strategies are they going to use to make Boost grow because Boost has not grown ever since EchoStar has owned it.

[[00:16:05]]
I'll start with Boost Mobile because there's so much to unpack. You mentioned that EchoStar likes the tagline, and we've seen it use it ever since it agreed to sell spectrum to SpaceX in September 2025, although that deal hasn't closed yet. The company calls it a hybrid MNO [mobile network operator], not an MVNO, and it still has the core, to your point. Does that give it any sort of advantage around retaining some of the owner's economics of the wireless network because it's still operating the core? Or, if you don't have the whole network, are you operating the same as any other MVNO?

[[00:17:02]]
In the last, I think, five years or so, most of the MNOs, at least the larger ones have been bought out by the MNOs. They've used them for specific things, such as prepaid in order to segment the customer base with lower ARPUs without causing a decline in postpaid ARPUs. I think Boost being an MVNO only, I think, is a move, but I think it's just a limited move. I think it's not something that's unique. There are plenty of other much larger MVNOs out there. There's not going to be a huge amount of differentiation that they can do that the other guys can't. I mean Boost's original differentiation factor was, hey, we are the only 5G standalone network in the country. Once you shut down the RAN, then that went away, but for most customers, it was like, okay, so you're 5G standalone, what does that actually mean to me? All I want is my phone to work everywhere that I want to use it and fast and no congestion and so on. The marketing wasn't as strong as it could have been. I think that was reflective in the fact that the subscriber counts were dropping, so obviously, they were losing subscribers to other entities.

Even the deal to add SpaceX as a D2D provider doesn't really make a lot of difference because most of the Boost customers being prepaid customers, they're living in cities and urban areas. They're really not going out of… They're not international travellers. They're really not travelling to areas not covered by terrestrial network mostly. I mean some of them obviously will, but it just seems a bad fit that it seems like it was a quick fix to the question of, well, what makes Boost unique. It was just like a quick answer, but it's not really a viable long-term position. I mean, the biggest issue that Boost had was it was not adding subscribers. They built out the network. They claim to have done the coverage. I think things might have been different from the FCC if they had been adding subscribers and growing the business, but the business didn't seem to be growing. Now the question is can they get to a subscriber base that will keep the MNO profitable, and obviously, MNOs are never going to lose a big deal to an MVNO that they don't own, at least because they can always cut their margins a little bit and still make more money than getting the deal through an MVNO. I think it's a tough position to be in. It's very hard to gain a customer and very easy to lose a customer in that business. I just think it's going to be a hard slog for them unless this hybrid MNO thing is a placeholder for something else that they want to do.

[[00:20:56]]
Ultimately, the big question with EchoStar is what else could it be doing? The company will be highly capitalised after all its sales close, but to the point you were making earlier, and I don't think anybody is going to argue with you on this, it seems as if EchoStar is trying to take some of the capital out of the business and get returns. Do you see a natural pivot beyond where it is today? It talks about a hybrid MNO, but it's really not differentiated from any true MVNO. Do you see a quick pivot that could make EchoStar's hybrid MNO more than just another MVNO in the market?

[[00:21:58]]
No, I don't see anything that's going to be quick and it's just going to be, "Oh, this is the best thing since sliced bread." To me, the more I keep looking at this, the more it seems like it's a way to either wind down the business or dispose of assets within the business and extract the cash and perhaps have that go in a different way where it becomes an investment fund, which you could almost argue that's what it is today. It's a pile of cash once the spectrum licences are sold and a tracking stock for SpaceX. It's not clear that there's anything that they're going to go after. Certainly, they've got some very capable people, some very capable engineers, but it's a case of, "What are you really going to go after?" You can't be a fourth network. Your MVNO, you're going to be fighting on that one on all sides. There's lots of competition there. The TV business, yes, that could get merged and there could be some value extracted out of that and perhaps the same thing with Hughes, there's some value to extract out of that. They're all in businesses that are not growing.

Even like the cellular business, it's not growing. Everyone who has a phone has a phone. The only way to increase revenues has been to increase the price to customers. That's not a growth business. Maybe they're like, "Okay, all this telecom stuff is levelling off. We need to amass cash and go out after a new business entirely, and perhaps, we'll do that as an investor initially and then get more involved later on as we understand the business more." That could be a reasonable strategy. I mean, at the end of the day, I have no idea how old Charlie is, but at some point, he's got to be thinking about, "It would be nice to retire," or perhaps, he's going to be something like a Sumner Redstone and he's just going to keep going until he can no longer go anywhere, which certainly, there have been some founders of companies like Warren Buffett is another great example that he kept going until he couldn't. Maybe that's what he'll do. Instead of running a business with tens of thousands of employees, he'll run a more smaller investment fund investing in certain things, which would be probably less stressful, but which still catered to his dealmaking and strategy aspects of what he's always liked within the business.

[[00:25:30]]
You mentioned that there could be value to extract out of Hughes, and you highlighted potential options, whether with competitors in similar positions or even a PE firm. I know we mentioned that it's not growing, but is there a fit in the market for Hughes still? You talked about the structural disadvantages of LEO [low Earth orbit] vs GEO [geostationary Earth orbit]. We're only getting more LEO. SpaceX is only putting more satellites up, increasing its scale and capacity. You alluded to the possibility of going after enterprise clients, but is there a space in the market that won't eventually be all LEO?

[[00:26:35]]
No. All the businesses have had good runs. I think it's just a case of technology and has overtaken. I do think there's a lot of… Especially within the broadband market, it's still a proprietary technology. In direct-to-device, D2D, that has all been standardised. The new technology that will be deployed makes it successful because you basically are just adding the capability to smartphones and to other cellular devices that simply the software update or maybe there's a turn on the chip, but it's going to become a commercially off-the-shelf technology vs a proprietary technology that my network doesn't work with your network and therefore, you need different devices. Scale, competition, everything in that market will grow, and it will launch a lot more access to it. Now that standardisation is coming to broadband, but we're not there yet. Maybe there's a play in that. Certainly, Hughes has a strong play. Hughes is a monolith in many ways, but it has aspects of building ground stations for satellite networks, is very strong in that. That is something which obviously, with all the new networks that have been proposed, there's some business there, but it's not a recurring-revenue business. It's not a services business.

There is maintenance for it, but with all the additional broadband coming on board, broadband networks, then perhaps there's aspects of that that they can get involved in. Perhaps, that's an aspect that they could grow in. However, a lot of these companies are looking more at vertical integration as opposed to selecting a vendor. SpaceX is a good example where they're vertically integrated on the launch side and the satellite side as well as on the terminal side, whereas a lot of the traditional model has always been, "Oh, we'll just let multiple vendors build out the terminals that use our network." That's not necessarily the most effective model anymore. As standardisation comes in, then either you're in front of that or you're going to get ploughed out of the way because you're just not going to be competitive. There is a potential there, but a lot of the businesses and even the whole Hughes strategy, which mirrors what Viasat is doing, which mirrors what SES Intelsat is doing and Eutelsat and even Telesat is we're saying basically that we're going to go to government and enterprise because we can't compete in consumer, and we're going to let the new guys take the consumer business as in SpaceX.

The problem with that is that the bigger market probably is the consumer market, and they maybe don't care so much about quality of service and so on, but it's The Innovator's Dilemma, which Clayton Christensen's book basically said, "That's where they start. They start there. They generate cash and they use that cash then to come and attack your core enterprise and government businesses." There's no real long-term escape. Either you decide to compete with them from day one or all you're doing is rearranging the deck chairs for a future problem that you're going to have in five or 10 years' time. They either have to get some new strategy and figure out how they're going to compete for the long term or it's just going to be managing a wind down of another business over time. That's why I'm thinking that EchoStar may just begin to look at this and say, "You know what, we're not really strong in anything."

If you use the old Jack Welch GE strategy of, "You're either number one or number two in the industry or we're not in it." Then if they use that strategy, then I think it would be a case of, "Hey, let's wind up most of these things and move on and then go and find some other way to invest money and make money" because at the end of the day, that's what Charlie is into. He's into being shown as a shrewd, long-term investor with making significant returns. While he might have some affection for the satellite TV business because that's how he got into this position, that's where the original money came from, don't necessarily see him saying, "Yes, I want to go down with that ship." He's a shrewd investor, and I think that's what he's more of an investor and long-term wealth creator is his thought process and perhaps he will take the time to… This is the time. This is the time to get out of all these businesses, extract the wealth and then look for where we want to go in the future.

[[00:32:26]]
You mentioned standardisation within D2D vs broadband's proprietary technology. As standardisation eventually happens there, wouldn't it be easier to have more vendors in the ecosystem? If everything is relatively standardised, why do I need to make the hardware terminals? Maybe that doesn't make sense for the long-term strategy, but I want to understand that dynamic, because even outside of EchoStar, I think that the standard-based approach is interesting.

[[00:33:01]]
Yes. Standards, it changes the ecosystem. Let's just pick Iridium, I guess, as a good example. They make their own technology. All their radios, all the core radios that work on the network, they're all designed by Iridium. They're all manufactured under contract to Iridium by contract manufacturers. Then they sell those out and either produced as finished products or as modules that are built into other products. What it does is that whole business piece there disappears because it goes into the guys who make chipsets for cellular and IoT that operate on those networks. It will be a similar thing where you go from Iridium, which probably sells maybe a couple of hundred thousand devices a year. Now you're going to people who are selling millions to tens of millions of chipsets a year. The scale economy just changes. You're right. The players change and Iridium was vertically integrated. There are others that weren't like Inmarsat and others who chose to have outside vendors. All those outside vendors, they're all going to be in a tough spot. Their business will change to be more of a packaging one.

There's still a need beyond the basic smartphone technology to build application-specific devices, should we say, or vertical market-specific devices. You are not going to trust your yacht communication systems to a smartphone that if it gets too wet or too much salt air, it's going to rust out. You're going to want a more robust and a better device for those sort of scenarios, but the underlying technology is all going to be the same. It's just how do you build it and what are the interfaces. The component parts or maybe the expertise of a lot of it is going to shrink to a different set of vendors, but it's the packaging that may, therefore, be the differentiation factor, but the actual cost of the devices are going to get a lot cheaper. That's ultimately what standardisation brings is it's going to bring far more users into the market than was previously possible. If you look at almost all the mobile satellite guys, there's maybe five million or 10 million devices when you look across voice, data and IoT. That's a trivial number in reality compared to the worldwide population. The need for communication, I think, is always there. I think everyone will always accept a higher bandwidth if you can give it to them at the right price, which I think is what has been shown.

SpaceX has definitely shown that in broadband that you bring the pricing down, then you can compete with the rural broadband providers, and this is going to be the same thing with cellular. I think as those devices and price points can come down, it becomes a scaling factor that if you have much cheaper hardware, then you can sell it with a much cheaper service package and you can gain incremental revenues beyond what you could gain if you had only expensive hardware. The market gets bigger, the revenue pool gets bigger. That's really what the standardisation will bring is a bigger pool of users through cheaper hardware and cumulatively more gross revenue, even though the individual terminal revenues might be much lower than they have been today. If you go back, and I can always remember the CEO of Inmarsat always crying about he's going to have all these multiple-thousand-dollar ARPUs in his maritime and aviation businesses. That was like waving a red flag to a lot of people. It was like, "If you're making that kind of money, then we can get in on that market, too." I think that's ultimately where it will just help to make communications more accessible worldwide and at a price that many, many more people can afford.

Maybe the spin-off of that is this great phrase that's been around for a long, long time in the satellite world is bridging the digital divide. It will make communications available to a lot more places and perhaps enable countries that previously couldn't really advance too well without significant terrestrial deployment, be able to begin to advance and get connected to the internet and do things that they couldn't do before simply because of standardisation, bringing the hardware and the service costs down.

[[00:38:51]]
You mentioned Iridium, which Rocket Lab plans to acquire for USD 8bn, as announced in June 2026. Can EchoStar secure a similar exit for Hughes? I should say that Iridium is more of a MEO [medium Earth orbit] solution than a true GEO. We talked about effectively winding down or getting rid of the Lyra constellation as something in EchoStar's IoT narrowband where Iridium is working now. The other big thing is that most of the spectrum in the EchoStar war chest is already spoken for. It's already sold, but Iridium had that L-band spectrum that was, I'm sure, a big part of its valuation. Is Hughes bringing any of that to the table? What's attractive about it?

[[00:40:06]]
I think the attraction for Rocket Lab with Iridium was, number one, they had L-band spectrum that was globally licensed and coordinated. That's a big deal. After Amazon bought Globalstar, it was pretty obvious that the next company to fall would be Iridium. I would have thought Amazon was feeling pretty annoyed that they didn't win Iridium because Iridium's L-band is right next to Globalstar's L-band spectrum, so that would have made a nice tie-up there. I think the vision from Rocket Lab, although they haven't really communicated this in any substantive way is the spin out of this or merging of capabilities. Iridium already operates satellite networks for others, so they have that capability. Rocket Lab obviously builds rockets and launches satellites. If you go back 30 years, Orbital Sciences, which is now part of Lockheed Martin, I think, or one of the defence contractors anyway, Orbital Sciences decided, "Hey, we build rockets and we build satellites, so we should build and operate a satellite networks because we get recurring revenue out of those as opposed to being sending one invoice for the rocket and one invoice for the satellite." They did that, and they created two companies, Orbcomm and Orbimage, both of which went bankrupt because there were very different timelines and cycles to establish the businesses vs what they were used to. Orbital Sciences no longer owns them. Both those companies went bankrupt. They're both still around in other companies now.

From that aspect, you could look at Rocket Lab buying an operating satellite network as, "Hey, we bought a capability, an operating capability that's already operating, generates cash flow. We don't have to stand around waiting much longer than we probably thought we would in order to get this thing into business, but there's other things we can do with it." I think that's the key part of this, that Iridium pioneered the use of this mesh network in the sky for connectivity. It's now quite possible that Rocket Lab will go out there and sell saying, "Hey, you know what, your satellite, you want to launch? We can provide the backhaul for that, and we'll interconnect it to the Iridium constellation and bring down the traffic." Hosted payloads, which is basically the Aireon business, it's a hosted payload on Iridium satellites. They could add to that. Iridium's PNT business could be much more interesting if they had more satellites, and that's what a number of other companies are doing like a Xona, they're planning on launching maybe 300 satellites.

Maybe Rocket Lab can… That partnership there is like, "Hey, we can build the satellites and launch them and augment the existing Iridium constellation and get going quicker and provide a much more powerful and resilient GPS capability." There's a bunch of things I think they could do there. Now with Hughes, the spectrum that they have is more North American, South American and is either Ka or Ku-band, where there's a lot of spectrum. It's not that scarce. It does have value, but it's not the scarcity of L-band or S-band that's used for consumer devices, smartphones or small satellite devices. I don't see there would be a similar thing there per se. Perhaps that's where breaking up Hughes into different parts in terms of, it does have a good engineering capability. It has some really strong engineers. Maybe there's parts of the business have just become broken up in a way that, as I said before, government aviation perhaps is one, but then maybe there's other parts of it that could go in a different direction.

Of course, the other strategy going back to Hughes and thinking of bankruptcy, which is you look at all the networks that have been relatively successful, like Iridium went bankrupt, then somebody bought the assets for cheap. Maybe that's another way that EchoStar could look at Hughes putting into bankruptcy, writing off the debt and then buying back the asset and then going off and competing at a new cost base, which would enable it to go target and make sales and revenue and profits. Iridium went bankrupt, Globalstar went bankrupt, Orbcomm went bankrupt. They all came back because the assets are still there. That's potentially a way that EchoStar can monetise that again if it's got a strong strategy to do that, and it wants to keep that entity going. You never know.

[[00:45:56]]
You mentioned engineers as an asset to make Hughes attractive for acquisitions, but is that actually differentiated? Couldn't I make the argument that a lot of relatively successful space companies are going to have strong engineering teams as well?

[[00:46:28]]
Yes. I'm no expert in that, but it's an acquihire, I think, is the term. Usually, it's based around a much smaller group of people. If you're stepping up an organisation that's going to do something and you need to get going quickly, having an already established organisation with structure and methods of doing things is potentially a way to get in there a little faster, but obviously, there are other issues such as cultural and merging of systems and processes with the other company. It's not necessarily a home run. It's just, I guess, one of the potential things that you have to get options, you have to work through to decide, "Hey, how do we extract value out of this?" I think it's going to be tough to find somebody… Charlie Ergen doesn't like to sell things to people if he doesn't think he's getting what they're worth. I would imagine that he has a pretty high valuation on Hughes. Whether somebody could get to what he thinks it's worth, I don't know, but that's always been the nut to crack. Clearly, he does sell because he's sold two lots, two tranches of spectrum.

Clearly, he thought he was getting what they were worth there. It might take some time, I think, but I mean, he has two strong engineering groups because he's got the Denver-based one within Dish and Boost and then he's got the Germantown one, which is Hughes. Maybe there's other aspects there where some of those groups are moved around a bit and it all depends on what he needs in the end in order to run the businesses that he wants to keep. Obviously, he's not shy of disposing of things that he doesn't want.

[[00:49:06]]
Could you walk me through the relative value of EchoStar's remaining spectrum war chest? There's obviously been restrictions with CBRS, and it still has some of the millimetre wave there, too. We've seen the company coming for the S-band, and we've seen AT&T coming for the more mid-band spectrum. That's where a lot of the spectrum acquisitions have happened. Is anybody going to want what's remaining? Some of the cable MVNOs, and Verizon as well, are putting a lot of stakes in getting some of the CBRS spectrum tuned up. Obviously, this isn't going to hold the same value as the S-band, but is there a want and need for it by other members in the market?

[[00:50:23]]
I think the CBRS spectrum probably is the most attractive. I think the millimetre wave is probably the least attractive. I think he understands that. He has a team that that's all they focus on is the spectrum and spectrum value. I think he will have a keen eye on that and would… I don't have dollar numbers or whatever. I've never actually sat there and valued it, but you can come up with some values pretty quickly. Like everything, I think it's timing. It's just like the AT&T and the SpaceX timing, the S-band was not that interesting to most people 10 years ago. Now it's white-hot. People have been trying to get hold of S-band. The whole European S-band licensing programme will play out in the next year to two. That was a backwater. No one was really paying that much attention.

I think one thing that Charlie can play and will play is the time card wherever he can. What might not be worth much now, if you can figure a way of keeping it at a relatively low cost, he will keep it until such point as there's other folks who have found a use for it. I think it's really down to the technology. Because I think CBRS and C-band, C-band was the next frontier, and now that's widely understood and widely deployed. CBRS got a slow start, but it's now moving. I think there's going to be a range there, but I don't think he will just get rid of it for the sake of getting rid of it. If he thinks he can keep it, over time… Everything is beachfront property, they're not making any more beachfront. Over time, as technology improves, then other bands become more useful and deployable, then it will be worth more. He always has been a long-term investor. As I said, he'll see what he can get. Then if you can hold on to it, he won't just sell it for the sake of selling it if he can keep it.

[[00:53:35]]
What is missing from this conversation on EchoStar so far? What have we not gotten to that you think is important, given how many moving parts there are?

[[00:54:12]]
I think we covered most things. I think that you begin to say, "Okay, Charlie Ergen has had quite a spectacular career. He's built quite an interesting enterprise. He's employed tens of thousands of people." He is a master of using all the tools available to help grow the value of his business. He is well-known as a poker player, so he understands risk and so on. I think it will be very interesting. Only he knows. At the end of the day, he will talk to a lot of people about everything, and he's always on the hunt for information. He's always on the hunt for, "How do I move this along, but how do I give myself the ability to cancel this if I don't want to do it? What's it going to cost me to not do this if I find some information or I get a deal that I want to take and I want to exit out of this?" He's very skilful. I think because he has majority ownership, he always took on debt. He never gave away equity. He's always been in a strong position to control and make decisions, whereas a lot of other times, other businesses, when you look at them, the decisions, they are difficult to make and maybe they need different investors to come together, but he doesn't have that problem. He can make very decisive decisions and move forward.

Assuming that he gets into a mode where those decisions lead him down to whatever his ultimate goal is here, I don't know. I'm completely speculating whether he wants to create some sort of philanthropic entity or whether he wants to create some sort of holding fund that they're now going to invest in something else. He can do it. I think it's just a matter of he likes the mental stimulation of running a business and the deal making, and that will be as to what this eventually ends up. I mean, yes, the world will have some impact on it, but in the end, when he puts his mind to it, he usually gets what he wants one way or another. It will be interesting to look at this again in a year's time and say, "Okay, where has it gone from now and what's it looking like?"

[[00:57:51]]
Thank you so much for your time and your commentary. We will certainly have to look back in that year's time or so, but thank you again for chatting with me here today.

[[00:57:59]]
Thanks. You're welcome.

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