Dish Network’s Kelly quits
February 22, 2024
By Chris Forrester
Dish Network’s head of retail cellular and an EVP at the company, Michael Kelly, has resigned after less than a year in position.
Dish, now a subsidiary of EchoStar, said in a statement that Kelly had resigned and that CEO Hamid Akhavan would run the division and lead strategy and key day-to-day operations for the retail wireless brands while a successor was sought. Kelly will depart on February 29th.
Dish has been losing cellular subscribers amidst extremely tough competition in the sector.
Kelly was running Boost Mobile, Boost Infinite and Gen Mobile segments. His departure, following on from that of Stephen Stokols, who was previously in charge of the segment, places some questions as to the validity of Charlie Ergen’s expensive mobile strategy to create a 4th national cellular service.
Dish to date has spent roughly $6 billion to build a new 5G network covering around 240 million Americans and based on the ‘Boost’ brand which it bought from T-Mobile.
When Boost was acquired it had some 9 million subscribers. However, the position at the end of Dish’s Q3 was 7.5 million subscribers.