Dish Network’s plans to build a 5G network and become a fully-fledged retail and wholesale MNO are attracting rising criticism from some investors and analysts (see separate item below). But chairman Charlie Ergen insists the company is on track to deploy commercial 5G in at least one market by the end of this year, as promised, and to roll out a nationwide network in 2021-2023. Its first regulatory deadline is to cover 20% of the population with 5G by the middle of 2022, and 70% a year after that. It plans to adopt open architectures, such as O-RAN, and to build a disaggregated, cloud-native and multivendor network, in the same mould as Rakuten’s in Japan. This will give it a…