Good morning. I'm Dean Manson, Chief Legal Officer of EchoStar, and you can see here, and those on the web should be able to see the disclaimer for this presentation. I won't read the entire thing, but just to briefly summarize, there will be forward-looking statements in the slides and in the discussion. You shouldn't place any undue reliance on those forward-looking statements. They're subject to a number of uncertainties and risks, most of which can be referenced in our 10-K and 10-Q, which are available publicly, so with that said, let me introduce our Chief Executive Officer, Hamid Akhavan.
Thank you, Dean.
Good morning, everyone. This presentation today was initially intended to be us talking about our satellite system, the new LEO system that we were working on. And obviously, as a result of a number of changes that have happened, we have repurposed that, and obviously, we'll talk about our overall business. This was a very quick order. We did not put a lot of effort into making a full-pitch investor presentation. And this, as Dean mentioned, is not a solicitation for any sort of purchase or sale of EchoStar's securities or equities, but we'll use the time to talk about our business. I want to start by saying that we were on target to create an incredible platform for EchoStar, both from a based on terrestrial and a space infrastructure, which we thought would be unique in the marketplace and generating a vast amount of growth and value.
But in May of this year, we received a letter from FCC that was entirely unexpected, and it questioned our rights to the spectrum and essentially froze our business in a way that really we would be at the risk of losing an entire business and really looking at a bankruptcy as potentially the only option ahead. While we actually had met every obligation that we had committed to the FCC, we respectfully understood that FCC wanted to have our spectrum in the hands of other parties that could, sooner than us, bring it to more efficient use.
This was very difficult for us and forced us to change course and abandon our long-standing business plan and business practice and pivot away from it to something different and very quickly get ourselves geared up for a different mode of operation, knowing that that spectrum is no longer would be accessible to us, so this was a forced situation for us. We actually had no way forward but to make the most of what we have, which we believe would have been far more value-enhancing in the long term, but in the short term, we had to liquidate some of our spectrum to meet the needs of the nation and the FCC. Based on that, we made a couple of transactions, and I will take the time here to just mention a little bit about that and what that means for us going forward.
The first transaction was an AT&T transaction where we sold our 600 MHz of spectrum, which was deployed nationwide, and same with our 3.45 GHz of spectrum C-band license that we had not yet deployed. Those sold to AT&T, and we believe that AT&T was a great thought leader and very proactive in terms of stepping up and buying two pieces of unique spectrum that in the long run would be critical for the success in the age of AI. If AI brings a new business brain, the nervous system for AI is telecommunication. And how do you get to the devices and how do you get to the end last mile?
Because all of the processing at AI will be in a center, in data centers, in a core of the network, and then you really need to reach the consumers and consumption devices, which will be far larger than it has ever been in the past. So we think this spectrum will be in the hands of AT&T, very valuable for them, and they were very forward-looking in terms of stepping up and buying that spectrum, and as a result of that, we became the first and only today what we call a Hybrid MNO. I'll talk a little bit more about that when we get to one of the slides that talks about our mobile business. The second transaction was a transaction with SpaceX.
Again, here are AWS-4 spectrum, our H Block, and the global spectrum rights for S-band rights, where we had, again, as I mentioned, very high hopes to build on our own infrastructure-based direct-to-satellite. We were well on the path of doing that. We actually made a transaction with SpaceX and sold that spectrum to SpaceX for a sum of $17 billion split in cash and SpaceX equity, eight and a half each, and $2 billion additional payments on our behalf towards covering our interest expenses by SpaceX. In that regard, we also established a technical and financial arrangement with SpaceX for our use of their direct-to-satellite, or Direct to Cell, as they call it, system benefiting us indirectly at Boost Mobile. With these two transactions, we actually pivoted away from being an infrastructure-heavy, asset-heavy company to an asset-light growth company.
We'll talk a little bit about that in terms of our thinking as of now. So what is a company profile post the transactions? You'll see here that we still have a great subscriber base in the marketplace. Obviously, the colors are explaining where the subscribers are. It's important to note that when it comes to DISH and Hughes, those are fixed household connections as opposed to individual connections. So when you look at the households, 5.3 million households on DISH. Obviously, if you assume there's three or four people average living in a household, that reaches a significant number of people. Also, in the Sling, we have not talked about our Free stream, which also adds a significantly higher number of viewers than listed here.
All in all, when you put this together, somewhere in the range of 30 million consumers can be reached using our connectivity and services today, and we are very proud of that diversified base across the brands we have. Segment revenue is a kind of diversified revenue. That shift of revenue is changing both within and among the three or four revenue sources that we have here, but also within the revenue base of Hughes, for instance. That shift is changing from consumer to enterprise and the nature of that revenue changes. The company at $15.5 billion revenue, we continue to remain a Fortune 250 company and very scaled in terms of our operations. In terms of our ownership of a spectrum, we still have a piece or portion of our spectrum remains in-house.
The two transactions that you see here on the bottom, you see the bottom left, you see the AT&T transaction, the pieces of a spectrum that we sold to AT&T. In the mid-band of this chart, you will see the AWS-4, our S-band, global S-band rights, by the way. For those of you who don't know the terminology, AWS-4 and S-band are synonymous in terms of the spectrums. They both fall in the same band. For us, they were almost the same band globally and within the U.S. In the U.S., it's referred to as AWS-4. The rest of the world, we refer to that as the S-band, the spectrum rights. But generally speaking, it's the same spectrum around the globe. In addition to the H Block, that was a U.S. PCS band. That's the spectrum that we transacted with SpaceX.
And we still have in-house a portion of a spectrum at the top that we also moved to the pro forma side. We have spectrum on AWS-3 band, and AWS-3 is a piece of a spectrum that is deployed in all of the three other major national carriers. It is a very versatile piece of a spectrum, probably the most widely deployed piece of a spectrum in the wireless market. The CBRS, you're all familiar with, is an unlicensed and low-power band that also has a licensed and low-power band, which the government is looking to potentially increase in power levels. That's still a debate. And there's a 700 MHz of spectrum that we also have, not a large piece of a spectrum, but a low-band piece of a spectrum that is also very attractive in terms of its propagation characteristics.
So about 45 MHz of roughly, I mean, it's hard to put an exact number in there, but 45 MHz of additional spectrum remains in-house. So we still have some assets related to spectrum. Now, if you look at how does that look in terms of our financial capital structure, I will first focus on the left side of the page where we can show what the transaction entailed and what in red remains in the red dashed circle. So we had about $4.3 billion cash on balance sheet at the time of transaction from prior debt raise that we had managed in 2024. The proceeds from the transactions of AT&T and SpaceX, once they close and received, will be in the $31.2 billion proceeds. We have a debt repayment of $11.4 billion. We break that down on the next to the right side of the page. We'll get to that.
And then you'll see what remains on the capital structure post this transaction is about $24 billion in pro forma total cash, about $13 billion of total pro forma debt, and about $8.5 billion of SpaceX equity that remains on our end, plus our existing operating businesses, plus the spectrum that I referenced in the prior slide. Now, if you look to the right side of the page, we'll break down the payment of the debt that as a result of these transactions will happen. We started with $26.9 billion worth of total debt in a company. $3.5 billion will be retiring the 11.75% senior secured due in 2027. That debt was related to our 600 MHz spectrum. About $5.5 billion will be paid on a 10.75%, and we'll also pay the converts on a 1.9% plus a 6.75% senior.
These were related to the liens we had both on the 345 and the lien that we have had on AWS-4, so once we pay those obligations down to free up the spectrum that we have sold, what remains is on the right side of the page. We put that in a color coding in two different colors because that debt is in each of the entities that are listed here, so the $1.5 billion of obligations will be in Hughes, in EchoStar legacy or HSSC, and about $11.9 billion of debt remains in DISH DBS, and at the parent level, we will not carry any obligations at the EchoStar level, so this is the new capital structure for the company pro forma post transactions once the transactions close. Let me talk a little bit about the business units and any impact that may be on the business units going forward.
So we do have several brands that we market ourselves. EchoStar will not be our marketing brand for any of our products. We continue to remain EchoStar, keep EchoStar as the holding company brand and go to market under each one of the individual brands as we serve different segments in the marketplace. Let's talk about Boost. We're in the midst of a transition of this brand to becoming a very innovative, challenger, younger brand with very innovative distribution systems and very much focused on technology innovation and taking advantage of the trends in the AI and being unencumbered by any legacy infrastructure, relying on the most advanced telecommunication infrastructure anybody had ever built. Now, that is no longer the case from an infrastructure perspective, but you will see that we are actually keeping all of that advantage going forward using AT&T's infrastructure and SpaceX's infrastructure.
Again, very unfortunate that we could not own that infrastructure ourselves, which would have been even more value-enhancing in the future, but this was not something that we could maintain, as I explained already. So Boost, we have great hopes for Boost. Boost will be a challenger brand in the marketplace. Boost will be a differentiated brand by many aspects in terms of its presence in the marketplace, in terms of its technology. We are committed to remaining very focused on being a disruptive player in the marketplace on Boost. Let me talk about our mobile business more and talk about SpaceX related to our business. First of all, we think that SpaceX is the undisputed leader in the marketplace in terms of connectivity for internet today using Starlink.
What we delivered to them in terms of a spectrum will enable them to also become very effective and potentially repeating that in a Direct to Cell environment as we had planned on ourselves. SpaceX is highly integrated vertically, so their time to market, their cost structure, and economics that they have are superior to other satellite solutions out there. They're very agile in terms of their approach. I mean, they have obviously. I don't need to talk more about this. This audience is very familiar with SpaceX. They've brought a fail-fast mentality to the satellite. That's a softer mentality as opposed to the traditional satellite mentality of never fail, which usually is slower and is more expensive. You have to be vertically oriented to be able to take advantage of that in SpaceX doing that.
And the reason we're talking about that here a bit at length is because we do stand to benefit indirectly from SpaceX's use of this spectrum, first in terms of Boost, in terms of our mobile business, which we do expect to have to offer the products that SpaceX will bring to market and Direct to Cell using Boost and offer it to our Boost customers. And also, we benefit indirectly from owning a small piece of SpaceX's equity. As it comes to AT&T, here's where I want to talk a little bit more about Hybrid MNO. And this is something that we have coined that phrase, and there's no such phrase in the marketplace because nobody else has done it to the level we have done in the past.
So prior to this transaction, we were, and even as of today, we are still a complete carrier in terms of all of our systems. So the core network, our core network is cloud-based, is incredibly modern. It doesn't have any legacy, and it connects to our radios in the cell towers we have, the RAN. We also have a modern, very powerful state-of-the-art IT systems related to our core, which are BSS and OSS, as they're called. They're very modern, free of legacy, which allows us to be very quick in terms of innovation, bringing new products to market, creating dynamic responses and dynamic offers in the marketplace. We are going to keep all of that. None of that is going to be lost. The only thing that we are essentially giving up is our own radios, antennas in the marketplace.
We will connect to AT&T's radios, but we keep all of that infrastructure that made us a very agile, fast, and unique carrier. That remains in-house. We will not be encumbered by any other carriers' systems, either in core or IT systems. And so this is what we are very happy about in terms of being able to be that challenger in the marketplace, not just by cost structure and not just by having a fundamental radio system that would be different than anybody else. But because we also have the ability to create on our own and respond to the customer needs in a differentiated way, we believe in the age of AI, there is going to be huge need for new products and new services to be offered whether to enterprises or consumers. And I think we are well-positioned to do that.
That was always our aspiration to do it. We thought we could do it on our own in an even more effective way, more value-enhancing way. But now we kept the best of what we could using AT&T's infrastructure. So see us develop Boost, and we are committed to remaining in this marketplace even more aggressively than we have ever been in terms of competition and in terms of our offerings in the marketplace. Nothing in AT&T's deal prevents us, slows us down, or limits us from being that effective competitor. So we are very proud of the agreement we made with AT&T, and it was great for AT&T to try to help us find a win-win solution that met FCC's requirements, met the best interests of the consumers, but also kept us in the marketplace in a very aggressive way without any limitations to grow and compete.
So to summarize our Boost business, we will keep our mobile core, which is uniquely differentiated. We use AT&T's infrastructure, and now that AT&T has bought a great amount of low-band and mid-band spectrum, which I think that is critical for the success in the AI age. AT&T's network will very quickly become even more powerful. I mean, they can turn on the 3.45 GHz of spectrum overnight, quote-unquote, overnight, simply because the radios they have today, the technology they have deployed today is compatible with what we sold them. So this would be a very quick enhancement in capacity and quality of coverage for AT&T. We are on the top of that.
We also have the same connectivity, the same core network, the same IT systems we'll also use to connect to a SpaceX system for a direct-to-satellite, allowing us to marry the space-to-ground connectivity in the most effective way anybody can. And so watch us take advantage of that and hopefully be the most unique, differentiated offering around the world for Boost subscribers. As it comes to our DISH and Sling, I have to tell you that the most pioneering company in the video services distribution has been DISH, and there's very little doubt about that, what Charlie Ergen and DISH and his creation has done to the marketplace to this day. Many of the things we have are owed to him and his creativity and his innovation and his creation.
And we continue to play in that space, as evidenced by the fact that if you look at short of the pandemic window when nobody had an option to move anywhere else and they were all locked up in the house, excluding that window, we have the highest loyalty, as evidenced by the lowest churn at DISH, historically lowest level of churn. Let's turn it the other way. Historically highest loyalty for the consumer base that we have in DISH, and this is all owed to a fantastic experience. It's more than anything else. Everybody has an option. More than 50%, 60% of our existing base has broadband connectivity. So our DISH consumers and customers have broadband connectivity, and they continue to use the satellite connectivity we offer them because the experience is unparalleled. And I can tell you my own experience, having used everybody else's, speaks to that.
We have increased viewership both for Sling and DISH, 8% year- on- year for DISH, and that's a very large 18% year- on- year for Sling in a day that there's so many other distractions and ways for people to get their content, especially if they have broadband. Just the viewership going up 8% year- on- year for DISH and 18% for Sling. It's incredible, and we have a very large base of loyal Freestream Sling users, significantly larger than the paid. And that base, both feeds are free-to-paid and also feeds are media sales. So Freestream is also a big part of our business, and Sling continuously gets rated as one of the best streaming services out there. Combination of what the content is, innovation on the content, and also the user experience is really the key.
We have a dedicated team of developers that will continue to develop for both of those brands. When it comes to Hughes, Hughes is a smaller segment in our business unit, but it has punched way above its weight in terms of recognition in the marketplace and is in transition to become a larger enterprise company. Three years ago, we started heading towards repositioning Hughes more towards enterprise as satellite connectivity to consumers was becoming more crowded. We anticipated and also saw subsequently that Starlink came to market. We think Kuiper is going to be in the market. There may be others in the market in terms of consumer. I think there is an incredible amount of demand in the enterprise, not just satellite connectivity, but what we are focused on as resilient connectivity. That's a combination of satellite and terrestrial.
One of the things that we really focus on is making sure that we marry all sorts of different ways to give the customers what they need, both in terms of combination of cost and perseverance, which is resonating very well with mission-critical industries and governments. I will talk about a couple of those very briefly here just to highlight one of the areas we have made significant progress on the enterprise side in the past two years has been our aero business. We have already announced a couple of different airlines. You know about Delta Air Lines. You know about Turkish Airlines. We have a couple of other airlines that we are very optimistic about, hopefully making announcements soon about, having agreements with them, putting us in a very good position of a scale in terms of our aero business.
We're already looking at $1.8 billion worth of backlog in sales in the aero side. Our uniqueness in the aero is that we have brought a future-proof solution to the airlines where airlines have the ability in a combination of Ka and Ku- band connectivity, source their connectivity from multiple different providers, not just on entry, but also over time as our system will remain compatible with a number of providers of LEO and GEO systems. So not only today, but in the future, the airlines can shop around, have the flexibility to buy from different suppliers and mix and match combination LEO and GEO. Nobody else does that. Today, nobody else does that. That resonates very well with the airline industry. This flexibility that we offer to the airlines has been the draw. Hopefully, we'll have additional airlines to announce.
Much of that is also attributable to the antenna technologies that we have developed, what we call an ESA, electronically steered antennas that are highly powerful in terms of performance and cost and value. We're not a large player in the military, but given our heritage of delivering robust and now more than ever resilient telecommunication connections, this is resonating very well with the governments and the Department of Defense. So we do expect that going forward, Hughes will be also seeing much more growth in there in terms of software-defined engineering for resilient telecommunication systems. So what is EchoStar's future direction? And here, I only limit this to one slide. I think, first of all, we are in transition. This is very quick post the announcements we have made.
We probably would not have had this presentation today had it not been prescheduled, and we had the opportunity to be here. We didn't want to miss the opportunity to at least be on the stage and explain what we have done. So please consider this all in work in progress. But we thought it would be great to give you a very first glimpse of our thinking today. In the Q&A session, we'll try to address any questions you might have related to this. But first of all, we are going to be an asset-light growth company. That's the forced pivot that we had to make by disposing our spectrum that we had not planned on selling at this time. We thought over time that could be a more value-enhancing infrastructure for us, but much more than what we have managed to get today. But I explained that already.
We're focused on risk balance, asymmetrically positive on the return side. We definitely will look for total shareholder return as the picture. We're going to have emphasis on connectivity and communication. That's been the core alley and runway that for the past 40 years the company has built revolutionary and disruptive businesses on. We won't give up any of that heritage, but we'll expand on that, so you will see us expand our aperture now that we have additional capital at hand and additional opportunities to deploy our resources. You should hope to see an expansion of that if we are successful in implementing the strategy we're talking about here. Our focus is always a diversified portfolio of platforms. We have platform thinkers, not point thinkers, wanting to expand on a thesis. Very much a longer-term view company.
We're not day traders, and we're not looking at up and downs that happen in the marketplace on a regular basis. We're looking at the long-term thesis in a very results-driven company. We obviously are an operating company with a mantra and mission to make sure that we remain efficient. And more than anything else in deploying our capital, we are very much focused on downside protection and preserving the capital, having an ownership mindset. Most private equities and investors and operating companies talk about the mentality of ownership, but none ever can be more than here, where we have a founder that actually owns much more of an equity than anybody else out there, so very much an ownership mindset with downside protection.
Now, some of the benefits of our company that we would like to make sure we maintain and capitalize on is that we have a very long 45-year institutional heritage and knowledge that we are very proud of. I mentioned that we're going to keep that. That is one of our unique assets and differentiations. People in our business who deployed the first O-RAN technology in a way that nobody else has done in the world, we're not losing that capability. We're not losing the knowledge and institutional learning that we have had on the mobile side of the business. We're not losing that. We're keeping all that talent, the core talent for technology there. Obviously, the content business, I think the company has written the rules for the content business practically. They're very much staying there. So that experience will remain with us.
The scale of a Fortune 250 company stays with us. We will have enough resources to make sure everything is properly fed and developed. And we have the flexibility of being a public company. So accessing our portfolio, individual company that we have, whether you'd like a piece of Hughes, whether you like Dish and the content business we have, whether you like to participate in our Boost trajectory and any of the assets associated with it. We remain as a public company. This is something that is available to the marketplace. We think that's also an advantage that gives us flexibility to move and make transactions happen as necessary. I want to stop here because I want to make sure that we have time for Q&A. I would like to ask Charlie Ergen, our founder and patriarch, to join me for Q&A. Charlie, if you don't mind joining us.
Thank you. Charlie just landed like an hour ago, and so, coming from the U.S., so please give him a bit of a slack in terms of if he's a user of the service.
Let's take the questions
Let's take the questions.
Go ahead, right here.
We'll repeat the question, so.
Okay. I guess a combined question for both of you. In May, you get the letter from the FCC saying, "Use it or lose it." In August, you sell a bunch to AT&T. And then in September, you sell another chunk of spectrum to SpaceX. And you tied, if I'm misstating what you said, both of those to the FCC. So my question was, even after the AT&T transaction, even after you'd signed a $1.3 billion contract to use your S-band, you still thought it was the FCC pressure that would force you to do that?
Or did you go back to what you said, Charlie, two years ago, which is the following thing? What you don't want to do is compete with the richest guy in the world who's got unlimited access to capital. You'll lose that competition every time, even if you've got better technology. Sounds like that's still your view, and that might have also informed your decision with SpaceX.
Yeah. There's a lot to unpack there. We'll start with the beginning. In May, when we got our letter, we don't believe the FCC could do what they said in the letter. So that's never happened. But we would win the battle, lose the war because we were frozen at that point in time. So how do you build a network?
How do you get a return to shareholders when you don't know how long the proceedings will take in court to solve that? So I was well-trained long before I started business because when you played blackjack, you played the odds. And every hand, there was a right and wrong answer. That wasn't so dissimilar here, where the hand that we were dealt by the FCC was one that there's only one logical path that we were going to be able to take. So what was interesting about AT&T was, and of course, there were any number of companies that looked at the spectrum.
But what was interesting about AT&T was because we already had moved to this Hybrid MVNO and the fact that Hamid mentioned, "We're going to be able to use the spectrum that they bought to compete against the other guys," that was really an ideal situation for us. And Hybrid MVNOs, you're going to see a lot more of heavy capital-intensive industries where that capital gets shared with many users. You'll see it in fiber today. The private equity companies are buying fiber, and they get an anchor tenant, and they'll make sure as many people ride on that as they can because you've got unlimited capacity. That's what you want to do. So we're in a situation now where we're way more competitive in Boost than we ever been because we didn't have scale.
And so without scale, the cost of running a network was going to take a long time. And the key to a network is the brains of the network. The thing that's different about us, we thought Open RAN would be the big difference, but it turned out it was cloud. And it turns out Open RAN really hasn't moved as fast as possible. And that cost is now being borne by a partner in AT&T, not by us. So we get the flexibility of doing things in the cloud. Artificial intelligence can make a big difference. You're going to have to be in the cloud to do that. And so we're well-positioned to compete in that area. And then with SpaceX, we actually went to SpaceX, I think, about eight years ago to get them to build this for us. And they declined to do that.
And I think the relationship that SpaceX had with the government was one that they just weren't interested in buying spectrum. That changed a bit. And once we get a fair price for the and we were excited about going on our own to build it because we designed a really good system. But it certainly wasn't going to be in the scale that SpaceX could do. So they have been a vendor for us for a long time. They've been one of the best vendors I've experienced within 45 years. They've done incredible engineering stuff for us in terms of launches and changing things at the last minute. And what was interesting, and I think one of the things that was most interesting was we're also, now that we're going to be cash-rich and asset-light, one of the first investments is SpaceX.
For all the things that I see in the world today, if I could make one investment other than ourselves, it would be SpaceX because they've got 90% of the launch capability in the world today or 90%. I think that lead will grow with Starship. They have a manufacturing capability that's highly automated, is built from the ground floor up. So they don't always use aerospace parts. They have a different way of thinking, and so they can adapt. Then again, because they have broadband business already at high frequency and inter-satellite links, I don't want to speak for them, but I think where people will see their goal are places people haven't been thinking about. So we were going to try to interface with them anyway.
So that just became a natural once they were willing to pay a market price for the spectrum.
I'll add to that by saying once you sold a good piece of your spectrum, it doesn't matter whether you first sold the AWS-4 to SpaceX or we sold the 600 MHz to AT&T, we no longer had a network because both of those pieces of the spectrum were actually used in our network. So our base of our network was 600 MHz, the low band. And then the capacity driver was the AWS-4, the mid-band. If you transacted on either one of those pieces of the spectrum, you were forced to do the second transaction.
Also, once you're in this business and in mobile business, once you start losing the critical mass of the spectrum, even if you sell some, you will become subcritical in terms of we just talked about how important the spectrum is, but your ownership of the spectrum drops down to the point where in the longer term, you're no longer competitive. So any piece of the spectrum that we were forced to dispose would automatically snowball the effect of making sure that we can no longer maintain a critical mass of the spectrum ownership to be a viable player. We did the best we could.
I mean, this was a forced hand, but obviously, Charlie and I spent a lot of time thinking about what is in the best interest of everyone and respectfully accepted FCC's desire to make sure this spectrum ends up in other hands that can more quickly bring it to more people. So we made the best we could do. And as Charlie said, we could do better on our own, but that's a different topic. There was a Rick. Maybe you can take a Rick. Rick usually is the first guy asking questions. Let's see what he has to say.
I got in today like Charlie got in today.
Always Rick. Go ahead.
Yeah. Thanks, guys. Charlie, at the Investor Day several years back in Vegas, you had some aspirational goals about how big Boost could become.
So when you think about an MVNO strategy, a Hybrid MVNO strategy, the relationship with SpaceX, Starlink, first question is, what are those aspirational thoughts about what Boost could be? Hamid, you said you're committed to Boost.
Yeah. The aspiration goals for Boost are exactly the same. I think it's passed a little bit easier for two reasons. One is we actually know what we're doing now. So we were the most ignorant people in wireless four or five years ago, for sure. And we've learned a lot of hard lessons. But through that, you keep learning, and you keep getting better, and you keep practicing. And we've been doing that. And the second thing, obviously, we'll have capital.
The aspirational goals for Boost, I think it's going to be a good growth business for us in ways that you certainly haven't seen yet.
Then a detailed question back on the pro forma. You mentioned $24 billion cash pro forma, $15 billion debt pro forma. What are the tax implications of the transactions? Does that also then assume I think the tower rent maybe is $4 billion ballpark legacy lease out there? Is that all reflected into that?
It's very, again, this is happening. We are still only days away from these transactions. Tax guys usually and other guys will need much longer time to tell you the answer to your question. I would love to know the answer to those myself as well.
We certainly deal with whatever obligations we have, looking at the options we have and looking at what the tax calculations are. There's a wide range in the marketplace somewhere, I don't know, $5 billion-$10 billion worth of calculations other people have done. We have not done that calculation in detail, but there's a wide range out there. In time, once we get our arms around it, we're happy to share. But again, you cannot handicap it to any narrow range. Some people have talked about $15 billion, $5 billion-$15 billion, but somewhere in that range when you talk about everything that we have to settle, it's not.
The thing I'm going to tell you, the ranges I've said, I don't want to dance. It's a critical question.
So tax and liabilities, as we take down our network, right? You've seen ranges from $7 billion-$10 billion of what that would cost us. Okay. And then when you look at the spectrum, it's still on our balance sheet, but I've seen ranges from $5 billion-$15 billion. Right. So that'll give you a feel for it. I think we have a feel for where we think it might go. And we got to work with our vendors and work with the people who helped us build the network. And we want to do that upfront and have that relationship and continue. And then tax is tax. And it's up to accountants to figure that out. But we do have tax losses, and it will cost some money to take down the network.
So that's all going to be part of the tax stuff. And the tax rules are pretty favorable at this point. So, Rick, I think the key is where do you end up with it? And we're going to end up with a significant amount of cash with significant investment on the balance sheet in terms of spectrum and SpaceX to start with. And so before I answer Fred's question, I guess I would say it's about the fourth pivot for me personally as a company. And every time we pivoted, it was always a little scary at first. And it was always sometimes not so we weren't so necessarily happy about it. Scrambling happened. We were a $250 million company. And one day, next day, scrambling happened. We were zero company. We were zero. We went from $250 million to zero. So that wasn't so fun.
But as management, we went in. We were prepared. We read the future. We read the tea leaves. We were prepared for the things that were going to happen. We were prepared for scrambling. And we were building integrated receiver scramblers. And when we did that, we became a billion-dollar company. And our competition, who didn't see those things coming, went out of business. We had 200 competitors before scrambling. After scrambling, we were it. So this pivot is the same thing for us. Not personally exactly where we wanted to go, but we're also then excited about how do we see if we're good enough to pivot to something that we never had before. We're just having a lot of cash. And what do you do in a world that's changing really rapidly? But we have some wisdom that maybe some companies don't have today. Right.
We're not smart, but we've got a little bit of wisdom. And, Hamid, it comes from our private equity background, as well as being an engineer, as well as being in the telco business. So he already knows a lot about the private equity world. I'm not that good at that. I'm an investor in people. And so you give me a good company or a good person, I'll take a good person every time. Every time. So I think we have a really good shot of being pretty good in terms of how we build our business from here with a different set without the cloud of uncertainty, without the pressure of those things, without having to get IR people to go talk to the street, which was what everybody wanted us to do.
We're just going to go run our business like we always have, think long term, right, and try to do some things different than other people do. I know that didn't quite answer. Fred.
Hey. Congratulations to you both. I guess you're now the $42 million man. Right now, capital is as strategic and as scarce a commodity across the AI and communications infrastructure sector as it's been in a long time in my career. You all are going to be very cash-rich coming out of all this. And I mean, is there some expectation that over time you might evolve to look a little bit more like either a SoftBank or the Advance/ Newhouse diversified investment across some of the expertise with some of that capital? Or how are you thinking about?
I'm going to take a quick thing, and then I'm going to give it to Hamid because he's probably better to answer it. We historically have been builders, so I expect we're going to be. I think our core is we want to be builders of things. But we have dipped in. We did come very close to acquiring SiriusXM, and we came close to acquiring some other companies. So we have been in that. We've done pretty well at that, and we've been in that situation where we've been investors in things. But at our core, we're builders. I think there's going to be a lot of storm clouds on the horizon for companies who are like EchoStar that we're asset-rich and cash-poor. So I think there's going to be some storm clouds there. Interest rates, certainly long-term interest rates, probably don't going to come down so much.
So maybe Hamid.
Look, Fred, we are very excited. Again, this was not our plan. But as it happens, we find ourselves in a position where we could be uniquely positioned to be a significant player. I wouldn't want to compare ourselves to SoftBank. That's in a different level and different league. But we are much more strategic in terms of owning, having run businesses ourselves. Charlie and I have been in operating businesses since birth, practically, both of us. So I went to private equity, having been an operator for many, many years. When I went to private equity, I had a different way of looking at opportunities and looking on the surface and see what the trends are and how it's going to work as opposed to running a number of spreadsheets and trying to remain at that.
So I think we're going to keep that institutional knowledge that we have had, adding the experience of private equity and experience of investing that both Charlie and I have had in the past on top of that. We're going to be great stewards of capital. We're going to be asymmetrically betting on positive return relative to the risk. We are definitely going to be long players in terms of vision and horizon. We're not going to go with that very quick return type of mentality that some of the other equity firms have. We're not going to be like that. But again, the one thing that helps us here is that, first of all, we don't have to pay the 2 and 20 in a private equity business. Just kidding aside on that one. Also, we are a public company.
Usually, companies that are very diversified in terms of having a different set of operations and, I would say, almost looking like a private equity, we're definitely not a private equity, so that's clear. But looking like that, being public is a huge advantage because that's flexibility for coming in and then going out. People don't have to put money in a 10-year fund and wait eight years to get their return. Here, obviously, the fluid flexibility of being a public company is something that usually happens in much, much larger scale than an investment firm of small or mid-size. You know that. There's very few of those in the marketplace, especially one that is not so large that would be daunting to invest into.
So Charlie and I are looking at all of that as a whole and saying, "Look, this was not the hand we started with." But as Charlie said on his fourth pivot, we are in a position where we definitively see a horizon and aperture that is wider than we have had in the past, rather than narrower by the nature of things.
Question here. Yeah.
Go ahead.
Microphone, I think. Please wait.
Thank you. I was intrigued by your statement that the best investment you could make beyond yourself with SpaceX is a single-best investment out there. Does that mean that given the financials are not needed to liquidate any SpaceX, it would be more of a permanent investment?
If you had the opportunity to increase your SpaceX investment through excess cash, using excess cash to buy back EchoStar shares in the market, is that something you would consider? Or is SpaceX a transactional investment where you would liquidate it somewhere down the road and transition the money into some other investment?
It would be really hard to say. I mean, we certainly invest more in SpaceX today at the price we bought into SpaceX. But it's just rare that they have a huge moat around what they do. And space isn't going away. And they're very diverse between consumer and government in terms of customers. And when you see things like potentially Golden Dome and things like that, I mean, they have to go rescue our astronauts, right? They're the only guys that can do it.
They're the only company that can launch men for the United States, so they're just in a very unique position, and our spectrum they paid us $17 billion. They're going to make way much more money. Look at our spectrum position that we've built over 15 years. We have the highest ITU rights, so that means nobody can interfere with SpaceX in this frequency. So this is 40 MHz around the globe that nobody can interfere with SpaceX. Second thing is we have an exclusive for this spectrum in the United States, and the FCC just reaffirmed that, right? So that means that anybody else who does a LEO system, because you go around the world, every country in LEO is an island by itself, but you just can't get the economics, in my opinion. As a Western country, you're not going to get China.
And if you don't have the United States in this frequency, it's going to be very difficult. Now, there's other frequencies, right? So other companies here have L-band and others. There'll be competition coming from other frequencies. But when you read a lot of hype about the S-band, it's really, from a practical matter, I don't see anybody else building a fleet of satellites in that frequency just because the United States is off-limits and you can't interfere with SpaceX. And SpaceX will build, I imagine, will build thousands of satellites. It's for them to say. I don't know. But I imagine they'll build thousands of satellites. And then they have the ability to combine broadband satellites to enhance that.
So that means that if you think about what they're able to do, they'll be able to go to your home, but they're also going to be able to go to your phone in your pocket, and they can marry all those together. And if you really think about what that means, it's a big moat. So that's why I'm bullish. It doesn't mean I'm right. And then as a steward of capital and as management, it's our charter to go out and say, "How do we get returned investors better than just paying a dividend?" So you never say never. You try to go get a better return than that. And then one never knows. I mean, the world changes pretty fast, but I don't know if anybody can launch every three times a week. I don't know anybody who can build seven satellites a day.
I don't know anybody who's got a rocket that's four times bigger that you can actually catch it, that you can probably eventually launch the next day, catch it, launch the next day. I mean, that's beyond my imagination. And that's why I say you invest in people. But people don't realize about the greatest skill set that Elon has is building teams. He just has extraordinary teams.
Okay. Time, maybe one or two more questions. One over there. Sorry, microphone is here. Please, go ahead.
Okay. Yeah. Thank you. The question is about actually the Hughes. And so in your presentation, you mentioned that you would like to convert your Hughes unit more into enterprise-focused, right? Well, currently, you have more than 1 million subscribers on Jupiter, and they are mainly residential consumers, residential users. And you also mentioned that Starlink is a leader in terms of broadband connectivity.
So do you expect any maybe expansion of your cooperation with Starlink on that, or it's a bit separate thing?
Right. Look, Hughes has been in the midst of a consumer business. Connectivity is going to be a declining business for us. The reason for that is not just from space, which obviously we saw LEOs coming in, and then we had a GEO, and it's very difficult to compete with the LEO, which provides a lower latency, potentially better economics in the long term. We saw Starlink coming in. We saw Kuiper potentially coming in and others. We kind of saw that and decided that we would reduce our emphasis. So, again, it goes to forward-looking, making sure we take asymmetric bets on risk. We decided that we need to expand our approach to enterprise.
Today, I can tell you that very soon, if not now, we are almost over the 50% line on revenue on the enterprise side. So within a couple of three years, you will consider us primarily an enterprise company. And we'll serve the consumer greatly as long as it comes. And the other challenge is that the terrestrial coverage is also expanding on wireless. People are buying mid-band spectrum. AT&T has bought T-Mobile, one of the fastest and growing, and same with AT&T, one of the fastest growing revenue base and customer base is fixed wireless. And that is encroaching towards satellite connectivity. Net of it is that Hughes will become a larger enterprise company over time. I highlighted a couple of the areas that we already have good progress in or expect to make good progress in. There's more areas that are in highlights. So we love that brand.
I think it's a great company. We need to develop it, and now we have the capital to potentially make even bigger steps on Hughes. There was a question. Adam, I apologize. He has raised his hand, and I'll go with you next. Adam, go ahead, please. Adam, hit your microphone button.
How should we think about the modernization of the RAN spectrum assets given the resolution of the business? And then following up on that, it wasn't mentioned in your spectrum report.
I'll try to take that one. Yeah. So we sold about two-thirds of our spectrum. We have about a third of it left. We have some millimeter-wave spectrum as well. So we love investment in spectrum because it's a limited resource. From a fundamental thing, it's a limited resource that they're not making any more of.
It's Bitcoin-ish in that way, but it's also got a utility whereas Bitcoin does not. So we think that spectrum continues to go up in value. And so as we work with the FCC in terms of the flexibility we'll have, we're working with the FCC to make sure we have a lot of flexibility with the spectrum that we continue to have. And that will be the first step: what flexibility do we have. AWS-3, there's two things. One is an auction that will happen sometime next year, but it's required by the Senate. So we'll get a feel for that. But AWS-3 is unique spectrum in that all three of the big carriers own AWS-1 and AWS-3. So it's the same band. It's all in Band 66. So when you think about AWS-3, you got to think about AWS-1 as well.
All three of the carriers have it. Two of the carriers are always adjacent to where we have it. For the most part, their radios can handle the spectrum, so for investors, this is nuanced, but people didn't think of it originally this way, but the way we've always thought about it, we think of the value of the spectrum and the cost to deploy it. You put those two things together, so if there's no cost to deploy it, which that's why AT&T wanted our 3.45, they already have radios up and running, so then the FCC was really happy because within 60 days, they're deploying our spectrum that we were going to be years away from, but they don't have to deploy any radios for that.
So, it makes the spectrum more. It means that the value, more of the money goes to the spectrum than normally. It's about half to deploy and about half to the spectrum. So AWS-3 falls in that category in the sense that it's, for the most part, already deployed for the radio. So I think it has great utility. And I like CBRS because of its ability to do some interesting things. It's basically licensed Wi-Fi or hybrid Wi-Fi. So I think there's some so I think we still have a good spectrum position that will maintain value. And the key will be the flexibility and how long we have to work with it. And what was the other part of the question?
How about 12 GHz?
Oh, 12 GHz is part of that. I'm not as optimistic about 12 GHz in the sense that SpaceX uses it.
So we can use it without interfering. And so now that we're working with them, maybe they'll look at that more objectively. But we'll see. But I do think that there are things that SpaceX is going to do where we're a bit more on the inside. And the fundamental things they're going to be able to do, there's going to be a lot of offshoots from that. There'll be a lot of offshoot businesses from what they do. And you see it a little bit today. My son and I went to Africa. We took a little mini SpaceX thing, and somebody sold us a battery in a little kit that fits in there. Well, that person's going to have a pretty nice little business because they're very innovative, very, very neat the way the person did that.
So there's going to be a lot of businesses that offshoot of SpaceX. I didn't even mention IoT, but you're going to be able to track an awful lot of things in there. And they're not going to do all that. It's going to be too small for them. So we're just in a good spot.
Just a final question. There was a question over that I skipped. Go ahead.
Oh, yeah. Thank you. So just, I mean, you were close on DISH, DirecTV last year. So just curious how you're thinking about that. Is there another go-around there? And then also just how does maybe CONX play into all of this? Could that be sort of a pure play of just SpaceX stock in the public markets?
Yeah. So I'll take that. Look, at this point, I'm not going to make a comment about any next move.
But broadly, we said we are going to take a look at every opportunity that is out there. And DISH is a company that we have a lot of emotions about, and we love. And we think we're going to look at that and see what next moves are possible for DISH in terms of us developing further into it. If there's an opportunity to do something with DirecTV, we'll always explore it. Last year, we tried that. It didn't work out. There was a lot of challenges by the bondholders, and I think they should not have resisted that. But at the end of the day, looking at our every business unit with the lens of what we can do to maximize the value of that platform, it is the focus going forward.
It has always been there, but now we have more flexibility, freedom, and resources to structure those investments differently. So we're going to take a look at it with a different lens. It's too early for me to give you any indication of what we're going to do. But I can tell you that we love our children. And all of the investment companies now and in the future will be handcrafted and closely developed under the lens of Charlie and myself. I think this was probably all the time we had. I want to thank you all for your attention. Hopefully, we'll have another session with more details in the future when we have more clarity around where we're going. Thank you very much.