Dish Wants Tower Claims Zeroed Out
A judge said litigating the issue would push the company’s bankruptcy timeline into December
WASHINGTON, Aug. 20, 2026 – Dish Wireless is now looking to litigate its dispute with tower companies over canceled leases before it finalizes its bankruptcy plan.
That would further push back the bankruptcy timeline, a bankruptcy judge said Wednesday.
U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Christopher Lopez said the confirmation hearing, where he would approve the bankruptcy plan, wouldn’t start until Dec. 2 if the tower claims were litigated beforehand, later than Dish had asked for.
He said it could start Nov. 12 otherwise, still later than a schedule that was previously established in July.
That’s far enough that bondholders of Dish DBS, another EchoStar subsidiary that filed for bankruptcy at the same time as Dish Wireless, might now want to separate the two processes.
“There’s really no reason why, on the Dish DBS side, we could not proceed to confirm before and separate from the Dish Wireless confirmation process,” said Dennis Dunn, an attorney for the DBS bondholders. “It may be time to consider bifurcating the DBS and DW LLC plans.”
He said his team would talk with Dish Wireless’s lawyers about the issue and would potentially ask Lopez for an earlier confirmation hearing for Dish DBS.
The companies filed for bankruptcy on June 30. The DBS bankruptcy is more straightforward, and was largely hammered out beforehand with creditors.
The Dish Wireless bankruptcy has the biggest tower owners in the country (and others) accusing the company of trying to evade billions in legal penalties related to the retirement of its wireless network.
Until Aug. 11, Dish Wireless wanted to litigate the exact amount of towers’ legal claims after the bankruptcy plan had been finalized and use estimates to judge the voting power towers would have over the final bankruptcy plan when it was put forward.
Then the company changed course and asked Lopez to toss the claims entirely, or definitely find they’re capped at 15 percent of what the towers are seeking, more than $7.5 billion in total.
Dish attorneys said during a Tuesday hearing that they made the reversal because of a July 30 order from the Federal Communications Commission.
The agency had previously required EchoStar to set aside $2.4 billion from spectrum sales to pay any potential damages owed to the 170 tower and infrastructure companies suing Dish.
As part of some complicated pre-bankruptcy financial maneuvering, Dish Wireless actually owed Dish DBS debtholders $8.8 billion, and the companies were planning to have those debt holders draw on the FCC trust.
The July 30 order said that wouldn’t fly, and that only outside parties that had helped build Dish’s nationwide wireless network could get paid out from the trust.
With that being the case, Dish argued, the $2.4 billion might be enough to pay the towers and others what Dish says they’re owed, which never would have been the case with the $8.8 billion loan also in line, and thus the parties should resolve the bitter dispute and eliminate the bankruptcy’s main sticking point.
The tower companies were not pleased.
In a Monday filing, American Tower argued the request was a bad-faith “bait and switch” designed to make it easier for the bankruptcy plan to be approved.
The $8.8 billion Dish DBS debtholders are owed would allow them to vote on the bankruptcy plan and potentially approve it over the objections of tower companies. But that might be found to be improper by Lopez, the towers argued, which would eliminate the voting power.
In that case, the towers would be able to reject the plan. American Tower argued the effort to zero out or cap their claims low enough that the FCC trust could pay them in full was a “plan B” that would allow Dish Wireless to move forward with the bankruptcy in the event the intercompany claim is nixed.
