Dish says Project Genesis 5G is available in 100 cities, so we tried to sign up - The Verge

Dish Network says it’s launched Project Genesis — a 5G cell service — in over 120 US cities. But actually getting a phone and a plan is anything but easy.

On Tuesday, Dish Network said its “Project Genesis” 5G cellular plan was available to the public in over 120 US cities after a month of testing in Las Vegas, Nevada. Per an agreement with the government, which you can read about here, it had to launch it by June 14th. Otherwise, it would face millions in fines.

Having tracked Dish’s progress for years, we figured we should order a phone to test out the service, which is based on some new tech, and supposedly offers unlimited calls, texts, and data for only $30 a month. (There’s also an interesting gamification and rewards system in the mix, too.) The assignment of testing it fell to me given that I live in Spokane, Washington, one of the cities the service is supposedly rolling out to. But signing up for the service turned out to be no small task: at every single part of the process, we ran into issues, bugs, and inexplicable behavior from the Project Genesis website. We’ve reached out to Dish for comment about these problems but haven’t heard back.

The problems started pretty much as soon as I hit launch.genesis5g.com. Clicking on the “order now” button, I was prompted to enter my email and home address. But once I did, the site told me I didn’t have a valid address — not that the service wasn’t available at my house but that the address I had entered (correctly, I checked, several times) wasn’t right.

It didn’t appear to be limited to just my building; my colleagues and I tried entering addresses in several supposedly supported cities, but the site would tell us they were invalid. To be clear, this wasn’t a situation where we were incorrectly formatting the addresses. (Project Genesis’ website suggests addresses to you and lets you autofill the form using them.) It was saying that the addresses it had provided weren’t acceptable.

Clicking the suggested addresses fills them into the field, seemingly accurately. Yet the site would still reject them. (PS: no, that’s not my address; it’s a local park.) And no, I don’t know why it’s listed twice. That appears to be a frequent bug on the site.

After dozens of attempts at entering my address, I was finally greeted with a screen saying that Genesis is live in my area. The site then asked me to choose which device I wanted to order with my service. The choices are a black Samsung Galaxy S22 with 128GB of storage and a wireless hotspot. The phone isn’t full price — it’s only $399 instead of the normal $749 MSRP — but there also doesn’t seem to be an option to just order a SIM card kit for those who already have an S22. According to a support FAQ page “devices are exclusively available from Project Genesis,” which means you can’t bring your own phone even if you’re sure it supports all of Project Genesis’ transmission technologies.

https://www.theverge.com/2022/6/15/23168270/dish-network-5g-project-genesis-sign-up-issues-addresses

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