After Dish Network paid $712 million for airwaves in the last spectrum auction, there was a ton of speculation as to what the satellite TV company was going to do with it. Now, the company says it is thinking of using the licenses to build a mobile TV service with the help of a yet-to-be-determined partner, Multichannel News reports. The company purchased the airwaves in the big March auction, winning enough licenses to cover the entire country, except for New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Philadelphia and Boston. Because the cost of building a network would be high—between $500 million to $2 billion, some analysts estimate—it’s likely the company will take time to make any decision.

Dish Network chairman Charlie Ergen and vice chairman Carl Vogel said during its Q1 conference call that they still have to pick the right technology, the right business model, and the right partner, before it rolls out mobile TV. “Overall, our intent is to certainly bring in partners,” Vogel said. “We’re a long, long, long way from building anything out. We’re a long, long, long way from deciding who our partners will be and when, but we do think it is a valuable piece of spectrum that gives us an opportunity to have numerous strategic discussions that will provide an asset that’s additive to the business we already have.”

Today, Qualcomm (NSDQ: QCOM) provides a mobile TV service using its own technology called MediaFlo, which both AT&T (NYSE: T) and Verizon Wireless (NYSE: VZ) have started to sell it to customers. In Europe, the standard is DVB-H. Dish previously said it was going to trial DVB-SH delivers mobile TV via satellites, which is backed up by a terrestrial network. And, to complicate things even further, just today, we reported that LG (SEO: 066570) and Samsung are working together on a mobile TV technology that they hope will become the North American standard.

• Speculation Abounds On Dish Network’s Next Move In Mobile
• Dish Trialling DVB-SH Service
• EC Support For Mobile TV Standard DVB-H May Not Be Enough