EchoStar’s Dish pay-TV subsidiary has made its contracted interest payments, worth $114 million, to its lenders, and thus has avoided a potential default. The payments were due on July 1st and believed to have been made on July 30th and just within the 30-day limit.EchoStar will issue its quarterly results tomorrow (Friday, August 1st) when more details could emerge.EchoStar’s share price improved 8 percent on July 30th.The broadcaster said it continues to work in cooperation with the FCC to resolve concerns the government raised in May, “including by providing responses and information at the FCC’s request”.These concerns follow on from FCC Chairman Brendan Carr and his letter to EchoStar Chairman Charlie Ergen in May outlining concerns about the company’s 5G network buildout obligations and the use of 2 GHz spectrum licences. Elon Musk’s SpaceX had complained that EchoStar wasn’t using the 2 GHz/AWS-4 spectrum as authorised and argued that the FCC should let satellite companies, such as SpaceX, use it.Carr repeated his demand on July 30th, with Bloomberg News reporting that he had offered his “best and final” offer to EchoStar for the sale of the spectrum.Chairman Carr, at a press conference last week, said the FCC is pushing hard to free up spectrum, and “you have Dish effectively over the years sitting on a tremendous amount of spectrum that simply isn’t loaded”.Carr said his agency is “doing a lot of discussions with Dish and Charlie Ergen as well. He’s got a lot of spectrum there that frankly has not been put to its highest and best use in terms of loading the spectrum. We’ve been in conversations with him. Those conversations are ongoing.”
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