GigaOM Pro

The Facebook IPO is being covered from every reasonable angle — and probably an unreasonable one or two — so I’ll use this space to direct your attention to news that Dish Network has told the FCC that its timeline for building out an LTE network is unrealistic and the penalties for not meeting deadlines are too harsh. Dish claims it won’t be able to launch LTE until 2016 or later, which is about a year longer than the FCC’s proposed timeline. But Dish is sitting on a pretty big pile of spectrum that gets more valuable by the day, and there’s a good chance it’s simply trying to buy time to find the highest bidder. So if the company succeeds in gaining some flexibility in the rules, I expect the FCC to be watching very carefully to make sure it really is working toward launching a wireless service.