DISH DBS Corporation, DISH Wireless L.L.C. and 16 affiliates filed prepackaged Chapter 11 petitions June 30 in Houston, formalizing the wind-down of DISH Wireless’s facilities-based 5G network following EchoStar’s spectrum sales to AT&T and SpaceX. DISH Network, Sling TV, Boost Mobile and Hughes are all expected to continue operating without interruption — it’s DISH Wireless alone that’s being decommissioned.
The filing’s 30-largest-creditor list draws a sharp line between the vendors that appear likely to be paid and the tower-industry litigants whose recovery remains an open question.
Contractors Appear to Be Unscathed by Bankruptcy
WirelessEstimator has not learned of any reports of contractors going unpaid for the physical work of building out DISH Wireless’s 5G network itself; the disputes on record center on tower rent and lease obligations, not construction labor or materials. Those same contractors are likely to see a second wave of opportunity once the force majeure litigation resolves, since tower owners who prevail or settle will need crews to physically remove DISH Wireless’s radios, cabling, and other equipment from thousands of sites nationwide — decommissioning work that typically falls to the same class of tower and infrastructure contractors who built the network in the first place.
Who Looks Like They’re Getting Paid, Who Isn’t
Start with the creditor list itself, because the Bankruptcy Code forces DISH Wireless to sort its 30 largest unsecured creditors into a nature-of-claim column, and that column tells the story before a single motion gets filed. Ten creditors carry an actual dollar figure. The other twenty are marked contingent, unliquidated, or disputed — meaning DISH Wireless isn’t acknowledging a fixed number is owed at all.
Of note, Midwest Fiber Holdings LP, DISH’s third largest creditor, is the parent holding company of Everstream, a Cleveland-based fiber and business-connectivity provider that filed its own Chapter 11 in the same Houston court back in May 2025 and sold its network assets to Bluebird Fiber through a stalking-horse process. Notably, the same corporate family appears twice on this creditor list in two different capacities: the holding company’s $1,673,150 claim is clean trade debt, while its operating subsidiary, Everstream Solutions LLC, appears separately further down the list as an unliquidated litigation claimant with no dollar amount attached.
THE TEN TOP CREDITORS
| Creditor | Claim Amount | Classification |
| DWLLC Claims Trust (Wilmington Savings Fund Society, trustee) | $8,856,507,760.88 | Claims trust |
| DNC 11.75% Sr. Secured Notes due 2027, Guarantee (US Bank Trust Co., trustee) | $3,500,000,000.00 | Secured notes |
| Midwest Fiber Holdings LP | $1,673,150.00 | Trade debt |
| T Mobile USA Inc | $1,527,523.91 | Trade debt |
| Infosys Limited | $1,241,986.30 | Trade debt |
| New Jersey Turnpike Authority | $804,007.50 | Trade debt |
| Keysight Technologies Inc | $765,655.22 | Trade debt |
| Tech Mahindra Limited | $661,395.20 | Trade debt |
| Tillman Infrastructure LLC | $558,075.72 | Trade debt |
| PI Works US Inc | $500,000.00 | Trade debt |
The top two are financial claims, not vendors — the DWLLC Claims Trust at $8,856,507,760.88 and the trustee for the 11.75% senior secured notes at $3.5 billion.
Below that, eight names are straightforward trade debt: fixed, invoiced amounts for goods or services already delivered, with no dispute over the amount owed. That group is where Tillman Infrastructure sits.
The other twenty of the 30 largest creditors — the ones marked unliquidated — are dominated by, but not limited to, tower and infrastructure companies: American Tower, SpectraSite Communications and InSite Wireless Group as a combined claim; Crown Castle; SBA Towers; Diamond Towers II; CTI Towers Assets III; Harmoni Towers Infrastructure; Zayo Group; tower manufacturer Sabre Industries; Everstream Solutions; and cable operators with their own infrastructure disputes — Charter, Comcast Business, CoxCom and Astound.
A handful of names in that same unliquidated group have nothing to do with tower leases at all: qui tam False Claims Act suits brought by the states of Illinois and New York, a patent-licensing claim from Headwater Research, and a dispute involving the Township of Marlboro, New Jersey, among others.
None carry a dollar figure. The filing’s own “Global Note” attached to the creditor list clarifies that at least the tower-related claims among them stem from litigation filed by counterparties after DISH Wireless sent notices last September and October arguing that the FCC-driven spectrum sales to AT&T and SpaceX triggered force majeure, frustrated the purpose of their master lease agreements, or made DISH’s performance commercially impracticable.
| Creditor | Claim Amount | Classification |
| American Tower / SpectraSite / InSite Wireless | Unliquidated | Litigation |
| Crown Castle, et al. | Unliquidated | Litigation |
| SBA Towers, et al. | Unliquidated | Litigation |
| Diamond Towers II LLC, et al. | Unliquidated | Litigation |
| CTI Towers Assets III LLC | Unliquidated | Litigation |
| Harmoni Towers Infrastructure LLC | Unliquidated | Litigation |
| Zayo Group LLC | Unliquidated | Litigation |
| Charter Communications Operating LLC | Unliquidated | Litigation |
| Comcast Business Communications LLC | Unliquidated | Litigation |
| CoxCom LLC | Unliquidated | Litigation |
| Astound Business Solutions LLC | Unliquidated | Litigation |
| Sabre Industries Inc. | Unliquidated | Litigation |
| Everstream Solutions LLC | Unliquidated | Litigation |
Here’s the mechanical difference that separates the two groups. DISH DBS is seeking court approval of an “all-trade” first-day motion to keep paying vendors, suppliers and trade creditors of DISH DBS and its Pay TV subsidiaries under existing terms during the case — but that motion is scoped to the DBS side of the house, not DISH Wireless.
For DISH Wireless creditors specifically — which is where Tillman, T-Mobile, Infosys and the rest of the trade debt column actually sit — the company’s own announcement says all allowed claims against DISH Wireless will be liquidated and paid from the proceeds of the sale of its remaining assets.
In plain terms: everyone owed money by DISH Wireless, trade creditor or tower company, ultimately gets paid, if at all, out of the same pool — what’s left after the DIP lender and secured noteholders are served, generated largely by the EchoStar stalking-horse purchase of DISH Wireless’s assets.
The advantage trade creditors like Tillman have isn’t a separate payment track; it’s that their claim amount is already fixed and undisputed, so it converts into an “allowed claim” automatically.
The tower companies still marked unliquidated have to win or settle their force majeure fight first before their claims are allowed at all — and only after that do they compete for the same estate proceeds, behind roughly $8.9 billion owed to the DWLLC Claims Trust and $3.5 billion in secured notes.
The Assets and the Debt
The bankruptcy petition, AVAILABLE HERE, lists estimated assets of between $1 billion and $10 billion and estimated liabilities of between $10 billion and $50 billion, on a consolidated basis. A more precise, separately reported figure: when EchoStar and DISH DBS noteholders signed the Restructuring Support Agreement in March, DISH DBS’s pay-TV subsidiaries were reported to carry approximately $14 billion of indebtedness outstanding, addressed by that agreement and the debt paydown it contemplates.
That sits alongside DISH Wireless’s own debt load — more than $8.8 billion of which is held by the noteholders who signed onto the RSA — and EchoStar’s broader consolidated total debt of roughly $25 billion.
The plan’s more immediate trigger was $2 billion of 7.75% senior secured notes due July 1, 2026, which DISH DBS did not have the liquidity to repay on schedule because the $20.25 billion AT&T spectrum sale — the source of the cash needed to retire those notes — has not yet closed.
The Safeguard the Tower Industry Fought For
The one mechanism that exists specifically to pay tower companies if they win their court cases predates the bankruptcy filing and sits outside it. When the FCC approved EchoStar’s spectrum sales to AT&T and SpaceX in May, it conditioned that approval on EchoStar establishing a $2.4 billion escrow account — the “Fund” — to be funded upon closing of the AT&T transaction and drawn on for qualifying claims tied to the shutdown of the DISH Wireless 5G network.
Yesterday’s Chapter 11 announcement confirms the Fund survives the filing intact: it will be administered outside the bankruptcy case under an FCC-approved agreement between EchoStar and a separate Fund Trustee, and holders of qualifying claims in the Chapter 11 proceeding can seek recovery directly from it.
That escrow is the direct product of a lobbying campaign WIA, NATE, and the roughly 40-member American Wireless Builders Coalition ran for the better part of a year, backed by the Brattle Group study WIA commissioned, which shows what happens to tower rents industrywide if DISH’s defaults stand unremedied. NATE publicly credited FCC Chairman Brendan Carr for including the condition, and WIA president Patrick Halley called it support for “the infrastructure providers that make connectivity possible.”
It is not, however, a guarantee that tower companies collect in full if they win. Analysts at LightShed Partners estimated tower companies alone could have up to $6 billion in claims against DISH Wireless, and that total exposure across landlords, contractors and MVNO-related obligations could run as high as $13 billion against a $2.4 billion fund — meaning even total litigation victories for American Tower, Crown Castle, SBA and the rest could still leave the Fund oversubscribed.
Wireless Estimator noted in earlier coverage of the escrow order that it represents a real, ring-fenced pool of money that exists specifically so a court judgment doesn’t turn out to be uncollectible — a meaningful improvement over litigating against a company that could simply run out of cash — but that the $2.4 billion figure was never intended to make every claimant whole.
Where Tillman Infrastructure Fits
Tillman Infrastructure is the name in this filing most likely to catch people off guard, because on paper it belongs in the litigation column with American Tower, Crown Castle and SBA — and instead it’s sitting in trade debt, for $558,075.72.
Tillman is not a small player. It’s one of the larger independent tower companies in the country, according to Wireless Estimator’s database, with roughly 2,000 owned and others under management as well as hundreds more in various stages of development, built largely on a build-to-suit and build-to-relocate model that undercut the majors on price to win carrier business.
DISH brought Tillman on as one of seven new tower partners in a February 2021 agreement — alongside Harmoni Towers, Mobilitie, Parallel Infrastructure, Phoenix Tower International, Tower Ventures and Vogue Towers — giving DISH access to more than 4,000 towers as it built out its Open RAN 5G network. Tillman’s then-CEO Bill Hague called it a partnership the company was proud to support “in the years ahead.”
Five years later, Tillman shows up on the 30-largest-creditors list at a fraction of what American Tower ($200 million a year in exposure, by American Tower’s own account) or Crown Castle ($3.5 billion sought) say they’re owed.
There are a few ways to read that gap, and the filing itself doesn’t say which one is correct. It’s possible Tillman’s overall lease exposure to DISH is simply smaller than the majors’ — plausible, given Tillman’s portfolio compared with American Tower’s over 42,000 towers nationwide.
It’s possible Tillman negotiated a resolution, amendment, or partial buyout with DISH before the petition date that converted a disputed lease stream into a fixed, agreed invoice balance. Or it’s possible the $558,075.72 figure represents a narrow slice of the relationship — unpaid services, equipment, or a specific invoice — rather than the full universe of what Tillman’s master lease agreement with DISH was worth over its term.
What the classification does tell us: unlike American Tower, Crown Castle, SBA, CTI Towers, Diamond Towers and Harmoni, Tillman is not listed as a litigation claimant in this filing. Nothing in the petition indicates that Tillman sued DISH over force majeure, as the larger public tower companies did starting last fall. If that holds, Tillman’s $558,075.72 claim converts into an allowed claim against the DISH Wireless estate without a fight over amount — a materially better starting position than the unliquidated tower claims, which have to win or settle their litigation before they’re allowed at all. tower claims, which have to win or settle their litigation before they’re allowed at all. Tillman still draws from the same estate-proceeds pool as everyone else once allowed, and it isn’t guaranteed to recover in full.
