Crown Castle has stated that Dish Wireless has defaulted on its payment obligations to the tower operator.

As such, Crown Castle confirmed it has terminated its wireless infrastructure agreement with EchoStar subsidiary, Dish. 

The announcement comes amid a public spat between the two companies after Dish said it was pushing to exit its leasing agreement with Crown Castle, following EchoStar’s decision to sell $40 billion of spectrum to AT&T and SpaceX.

According to Dish, it was forced to push through the sales by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), and because of this, Dish sent two notices to Crown Castle informing the tower company that the sale of spectrum means its Master Leasing Agreement (MLA) and Master Product Agreement (MPA) held with the company “constituted force majeure.”

In response, Crown Castle filed a lawsuit against Dish.

Pay up, says Crown

In a statement this week, Crown Castle said that Dish is still obligated to pay the company $3.5 billion following the termination of the contract.

“Crown Castle and many other American businesses helped Dish and its parent company, EchoStar, build its wireless communications network with the expectation that it would provide a meaningful service to Americans and help the US continue to lead in wireless,” said Crown Castle in a statement.

“After Dish’s parent company, EchoStar, announced last summer that it was selling public spectrum licenses to AT&T and SpaceX, Dish notified Crown Castle and other partners in September 2025 that it was discontinuing its network business. Dish further asserted that due to actions taken by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), Dish believed it was no longer required to honor remaining contractual obligations to those businesses and workers who built and supported its business.”

Crown Castle said that Dish initially continued to make its required payments before defaulting on its obligations under the agreement with Crown Castle. “In an effort to protect its shareholders, Crown Castle exercised its right to terminate the agreement and to recover in excess of $3.5 billion in remaining payments owed,” added Crown Castle.

The company said that although it’s supportive of AT&T and SpaceX acquiring the spectrum, Crown Castle stated that “we will do everything we can to enforce our rights under our agreement with Dish and keep Dish to its word.”

“Dish is refusing to pay the American workers and businesses it used to build its network and meet the minimum FCC coverage requirements necessary to retain its spectrum licenses — an American public resource. Now those same spectrum licenses are being sold for more than $40 billion,” concluded the statement.

Crown Castle is the second tower company to file a lawsuit against Dish over leasing agreements in recent months, following American Tower’s decision to sue Dish for trying to get out of its long-term contract.

In late August, AT&T announced it would pay $23 billion to EchoStar to acquire approximately 30 MHz of nationwide 3.45 GHz mid-band spectrum and roughly 20 MHz of nationwide 600 MHz low-band spectrum for around $23bn in an all-cash transaction.

Just two weeks later, Elon Musk’s SpaceX struck a $17 billion deal to snap up EchoStar’s AWS-4 (Advanced Wireless Spectrum) and H-block spectrum licenses.

Dish and Crown Castle signed an MLA back in 2020, giving Dish access to lease space on 20,000 of Crown Castle’s cell towers as part of EchoStar’s plans to build out a 5G network to cover 70 percent of the US population.

Crown Castle owns, operates, and leases approximately 40,000 cell towers across the US.

The tower operator said that it doesn’t expect the contract termination to impact Crown Castle’s full-year 2025 results.