Crown Castle is the second largest cell tower operator in the United States that was founded in 1994 and is based in Houston, Texas. Crown Castle has a little less that 40,000 cell towers and approximately 87,500 miles of fiber located throughout the United States.
Crown Castle’s recent strategy has been their collection of towers, small cells and fiber networks. This strategy is rooted in a solid belief that these assets will prove indispensable as wireless carriers’ services expand and, as a result, the need for more infrastructure to maintain these services becomes more critical.
Crown Castle presently obtains about 84% of its revenues from AT&T, T-Mobile, Verizon and Sprint. Crown Castle has approximately 2.2 tenants on its towers. However, due to the expansive needs of wireless carriers, cell tower infrastructure is becoming more limited, with carriers competing fiercely for space. Simply, more need and limited supply is a good thing for Crown Castle and other cell tower companies going forward.
5G isn’t merely an evolution of 4G. It’s something very different. The rollout will mean new antennae systems, switches and other hardware. This equipment will need to be housed on cell tower networks, and this component of the equation is integral to providing 5G because of the new technology needs.
It is estimated that the number of 5G deployed cell sites in the United States is expected to increase by ten times from 85,000 to 800,000 by 2026. If these estimations are even close to being correct, Crown Castle could benefit from an incredible opportunity to increase the returns on not only its cell towers, but its investment in its fiber buildout.
As mentioned above, Crown Castle has approximately 40,000 towers and 87,500 miles of fiber in the United States, and this provides Crown Castle a huge advantage in the cell tower marketplace compared to its primary competitors American Tower and SBA Communications.
Crown Castle’s stock price increased by approximately 30% last year and, with 5G only providing even greater opportunity to Crown Castle, the value of its cell towers could only be on the rise.
If you have been presented with either a new lease from Crown Castle or have an existing one, contact us to discuss how you can maximize its value – Crown Castle should not be the only one benefiting from the 5G boom.
