Aging satellite TV provider Dish Network is supposed to be undergoing a major transformation from tired old satellite TV provider to streaming and wireless juggernaut. It was a cornerstone of a Trump administration FCC and DOJ plan to cobble together a new wireless carrier out of twine and vibes as a counter-balance to the competition-eroding T-Mobile and Sprint merger.

It’s… not going well. All of the problems critics of the T-Mobile and Sprint merger predicted (layoffs, price hikes, lest robust competition) have come true. Meanwhile Dish has been bleeding satellite TV, wireless, and streaming TV subscribers for a while (last quarter the company lost another 314,000 TV subscribers, including 249,000 satellite TV subs and 65,000 Sling TV customers).

Dish’s new 5G network has also generally been received as a sort of half-hearted joke. Dish also lost 123,000 prepaid wireless subscribers last quarter; it can’t pay its debt obligations, can’t afford to buy the spectrum it was supposed to acquire as part of the Sprint/T-Mobile merger arrangement; and expanding its half-cooked 5G network looks tenuous at best.

Last year Dish proposed merging with Echostar in a bid to distract everybody from the company’s ongoing mess. They’ve also tried to goose stock valuations by hinting at an equally doomed merger with DirecTV. But those distractions didn’t help either, and there are increasing worries among belatedly aware analysts that this all ends with bankruptcy and a pile of rubble:

“MoffettNathanson analyst Craig Moffett offered a blunt assessment of the company’s future based on Dish’s deteriorating pay-TV and mobile subscriber customer base: “Dish’s business is spiraling towards bankruptcy. Gradually, then all at once, the declines are gathering speed,” he wrote in a research note.”

From 2019 or so I noted that this whole mess was likely a doomed effort, primarily designed to provide cover for an anti-competitive, job-killing wireless merger. It always seemed likely to me that Dish (which had never built a wireless network) would string FCC regulators along for a few years before selling off its valuable spectrum assets and whatever half-assed 5G network it had managed to construct.

Despite this, trade magazines that cover the telecom industry tried desperately to pretend this was all a very serious adult venture, despite zero indication anyone involved had any idea what they were doing. And the deal rubber stamping and circular logic used to justify it ran in very stark contrast to the ongoing pretense that we supposedly care about “antitrust reform.”

Ultimately Dish will make a killing on spectrum, the FCC will fine them a relative pittance for failing to meet the flimsy build requirements affixed to the merger conditions, and Dish CEO Charlie Ergen will trot off into the sunset on a giant pile of money. Some giant player like Verizon will then swoop in to gobble up what’s left of the wreckage, and the industry will consolidate further (the whole point)

The regulatory impact of approving Sprint/T-Mobile, which consolidated the U.S. wireless market from four to three major providers (jacking up prices and killing off thousands of jobs), will be forgotten, and the regulators and officials behind the entire mess will have long ago moved on to other terrible, short-sighted ideas.