THE LITTLE MOBILE WIRELESS PROVIDER THAT COULD

WHILE THE THREE TOP OPERATORS ARE SADDLED WITH DECADES OF LEGACY TECH AND ITS DRAWBACKS, SMALL BUT MIGHTY BOOST MOBILE IS SPRINTING TO THE FUTURE

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They're a group of pioneers with a drive to change the wireless telecom industry, building the world's first end-to-end 5G standalone core deployment on a public cloud platform. They're already providing coverage to over 80% of the U.S. population using their own 5G mobile towers; their roaming partners raise that number to 99%.

They're Boost Mobile, and they are setting a new industry standard for agile and scalable network infrastructure, creating the fastest future proof wireless network running on American technology.

Dawood Shahdad, the company's VP, of Core Network and Innovation Labs, spearheaded the project and spoke to us recently about the landmark achievement. Given his scope of work, it's a wonder he was able to take a breath to do so.

For the past three years, he's been responsible for the design and operation of Boost Mobile's wireless core network in the United States. He's also responsible for the Open Infrastructure Radio Access Network (O-RAN) validation, and now the Open Ran Center for Integration and Deployment, a lab funded by the National Telecommunications and Information Administration to help promote O-RAN in the wireless ecosystem.

Shahdad also leads innovation labs for everything under the wireless umbrella at the company. Boost Mobile, an EchoStar brand, files patents at a rapid pace that outruns all of the other brands in the enterprise. He's supported by a muscular hand-picked team of just 100 people, 60 of whom work on the infrastructure initiative.

“We are rapidly growing our on-network subscriber numbers, and although we are just starting our journey, our competitors have the same network and the same complexity in the core network as we do,” he said. “They could easily be having 600 to 800 people running what we’re doing with a fraction of that headcount.”