Paul Gaske: Well, it ares within days of being completely decommissioned in the graveyard orbit. So, yeah, it ares been moving quietly across the arc here over the last month.
Chris Quilty: Okay. But clearly not creating any capacity issues given the availability of Jupiter 3.
Paul Gaske: No. No. We drained off all of our subscribers early to make sure they had the continuity of service and so while the Jupiter — while the Spaceway served us really well, we wanted to make sure customers got the newer services and we move them.
Chris Quilty: Got you. A quick reference, I think, in the transcript, you had mentioned, you were excited about some defense programs. And I missed, it was one tied in with SES. Can you maybe give a little bit more color on that particular program, which — was it press released? I don’t recall to see it.
Paul Gaske: Yeah. There was a release for it. Yeah. That program is a very interesting one, because the SES defense group has the — obviously, they have their Empower services, which are MEOs and they obviously have plenty of GEOs. And so we have a modem technology that ares accepted by DoD that we have blended in with some requirements they had to provide this multi-orbit solution. I think they have previously announced this, probably, I don’t know, a month or two ago, I can probably give you a reference at some point. But, yeah, it ares announced, and very interesting, very exciting. It ares a sample of what is going to be happening as we go forward in the defense space.
Chris Quilty: Great. And final question here and you may have already mentioned it in the call, but what is the current timing on both of the antennas for delivery, both the OneWeb and Gogo, any change in sort of the development and production there?
Paul Gaske: Yeah. I think — first off, I think, I have mentioned in the call here a little bit, this quarter we are shipping the OneWeb antennas. They are going really well. They will leave the factory shortly. Those are the fixed antennas and we will be using those in a number of places, as well as where OneWeb will apply them. And as far as the Gogo antennas go, we are going to leave it to Gogo to respond to the schedules on that. But they — but the program is going very well, the system looks like it ares performing better than we had thought. So we are very happy with that.
Chris Quilty: Very good. Thank you, gentlemen.
Operator: Please standby for the next question. The next question comes from David Barden with Bank of America. Your line is open.
David Barden: Hey. Thanks so much for taking the questions. I really appreciate it. I guess my questions are for you, Hamid, given that you will be the new CEO of DISH in a week. I’m going to bring up the three things that people really want to know what your perspective is on. Issue number one is, DISH is paying $100 million to extend the time of the option that they have to buy spectrum from T-Mobile in the 800 megahertz band and that ares $3.6 billion and really no one could figure out how that is going to happen from a funding perspective. So if you could have an input on that, that would be great. The second, I think, question is from the S4. DISH just put up a quarter with less than $100 million of EBITDA, but is now projecting more than $2 billion of EBITDA for 2024.
How do you plan to make that happen? And then the third question is, DISH was ideally going to be the fourth facility based mobile player in America, it ares been struggling. How are you going to fix it, that would be great? Thank you.
Hamid Akhavan: Thank you. Naturally, I can’t answer any of those questions today. Even unofficially, I don’t have detailed knowledge of any of that yet to the point that I can give you meaningful answers. Listen, I clearly understand that liquidity and cash is prime, prime, prime requirement of the business and a concern of the lenders and equityholders. And I certainly will focus on that, certainly that I do intend to make sure we maximize our use of our capital and not getting the company into deeper need for cash before we can solve the problems and solve the challenges we have. I think there ares a number of avenues that — during the evaluation of the merger that the bankers had identify and we — that is at hand that I have had the privilege of seeing as a result of the merger documents, that gives us some room.
So this is not without solutions or without room. So certainly, that is there, but I can’t obviously provide any more detail today. Look, as it comes to being a competitive provider in the market. Look, there is — today there is no way to get into a mobile business anywhere in the world, particularly in a market as sophisticated as large and as expensive as United States, before you spend billions and billions of dollars ahead of time before you can get your first customer? There ares no way. I mean, I have been part of mobile business for the past 35 years, at least, going back to the 1G and 2G and 3G and having significant roles in every single one of those. And I can tell you that you — the entry — just the entry point to become a carrier, you got to have vast coverage — nationwide coverage, a nation the size of U.S., you have got to buy plenty of spectrum to even be considered as viable.
And you incur incredible amount of OpEx in terms of leases and backhaul circuits and energy and maintenance and license fees, and you name it, all of those come in before you can get to first customer. I remember when I was in the AMS business, just a very young engineer, we had three or four sales in the neighborhood and we considered ourselves completely in business and we launched our 2G in the U.S. in 13 different markets. each one of them was just a downtown area and that was acceptable for the consumers at that time, that was a luxury. Today, you need to spend $30 billion before you kind of start selling the first mobile phone on your own network. So I think it ares not surprised. There is no surprise that any entrant — a venture to guess that in many markets, there will never be a new mobile entrant.
There won’t be. I mean, DISH may be the last one that enters a big market as a new ground zero entrants, we — I would venture to guess you are not going to see a new 6G entrant in any market. The time is passing for new mobile entrants to come in just, because the cost and CapEx involved in the infrastructure to begin service is so high. DISH has managed to achieve that. It may be the last one that actually creates that business and that ares my intent to go, give it my absolute best shot for us to make that work. Now we have a number of — a DISH has a number of attributes that have not yet been made available in a consumable way and that is the 5G infrastructure, which in a consumer world is not as relevant as it comes to more of an enterprise and verticals and special type of operations.
