Our annual look ahead at what’s coming for carriers, tower companies, contractors, and landowners.
2026 is shaping up to be a year of divergence in the wireless tower industry: Verizon is active while AT&T and T-Mobile digest recent acquisitions; tower valuations are strong while capital eyes the exits; AI is creating both advantages and blind spots for landowners. This year’s predictions cut through the noise to focus on what actually matters for carriers, tower companies, contractors, and landowners.
A Quieter Year from T-Mobile and AT&T
Don’t expect aggressive new build activity from either of the two largest carriers this year.
AT&T remains focused on its fiber expansion strategy and is deep into equipment replacement cycles on its existing wireless portfolio. Last week, AT&T made a splash with claims that it would increase capital investments to $250B over 5 years. Tower owners hoped that this meant that AT&T would finally start matching Verizon’s macrocell activity. However, AT&T did not meaningfully increase its capex forecast- they are still at $25B-$27B per year for the next few years.
T-Mobile is similarly heads-down. The US Cellular acquisition brought a significant portfolio of inherited towers along with the spectrum and subscribers. Integrating that footprint, adding T-Mobile equipment to inherited sites, and rationalizing overlaps will consume meaningful resources through most of 2026. New builds take a back seat to optimization.
For tower owners and contractors who depend on these two carriers for new business, 2026 will require patience.
Verizon Stays Active — But Starts Shifting Gears
Verizon enters 2026 as the most (only?) active carrier for new build-to-suit activity, and that should continue through the first half of the year. However, expect some slowdown later this year and into 2027.
The more interesting story with Verizon in 2026 is small cells. Expect a modest uptick in small-cell deployments as VZ works to densify coverage in key markets. This won’t replace macro activity, but it may signal where carrier priorities are heading over the next several years.
For contractors and tower companies, the VZ pipeline remains the most reliable near-term opportunity, but that may be changing.
FWA Moves From Afterthought to Design Priority
Fixed Wireless Access has largely been treated as an add-on — carriers identifying underutilized sectors and layering FWA service on top of existing infrastructure. That approach is maturing.
In 2026, look for all three major carriers to begin — or continue — designing sites with FWA as a primary use case rather than an afterthought. The key distinction: these won’t just be FWA deployments, they’ll be sites where FWA demand justifies the build, and mobile capacity benefits as well. When the business case for a new site can be shared across both use cases, the math gets more attractive.
This is a meaningful shift. It changes how sites are justified internally, how they are designed, and ultimately how many are built. Watch this space closely.
MD7 Gets More Aggressive — Landowners Should Pay Attention
With a reported $100M capital commitment, MD7 will significantly increase its outreach to tower landowners in 2026. When a company has that kind of money to put to work, there is increased pressure to succeed.
Landowners should be aware that outreach may come through channels or with branding that appears to represent their carrier tenant directly. Read everything carefully before assuming who you’re actually dealing with, and before assuming the offer in front of you represents your best option.
Their approach typically follows a two-track model: a lease renegotiation offer on one hand, a lease buyout offer on the other. Neither track prioritizes the landowner’s best interests — they’re structured to deploy capital efficiently on MD7’s terms.
The stakes differ when a company has its own capital at risk rather than acting solely as a third-party agent. Expect a more motivated, better-resourced version of the outreach landowners have seen in prior years.
Our advice is straightforward: If you value your lease income and want to protect it, get qualified expert help before responding to anything. If you’re open to selling, work with a broker who represents you — not a company that can’t even be open and transparent about its identity when contacting landowners on behalf of AT&T or Verizon. (They don’t include the name Md7 in emails- instead letting the landowner believe that the email came from AT&T or Verizon directly.) The best deal you’ll get from an unsolicited offer is rarely the best deal available to you.
More Terminations — Especially on High-Dollar Sites
Carriers are becoming more sophisticated in assessing per-site profitability, and the days of carrying expensive leases on marginal sites are numbered.
Build-to-relocate activity isn’t slowing, and as carriers continue to scrutinize their portfolios, high-dollar leases on sites that don’t justify the cost will increasingly come under scrutiny. Not every expensive lease is equally vulnerable — location, coverage criticality, and alternative site availability all factor in — but landowners with above-market rents should not assume their lease is permanent simply because the tower has been there for twenty years.
One accelerant worth noting: AI-powered financial modeling tools are making it faster and more accurate than ever for carriers to assess the true profitability of individual sites. What once required significant analyst time to model can now be run across an entire portfolio with considerably more speed and precision. Carriers can identify underperforming or overpriced sites — and rank them — in ways that simply weren’t practical a few years ago. The sites that were previously overlooked because the analysis was too time-consuming are no longer safe.
2026 will bring more termination notices than recent years. If you haven’t had a frank conversation about the strategic value of your specific site, now is a good time.
The DISH Fallout Continues
The DISH collapse didn’t happen overnight, and neither will its full impact on the industry.
Contractors and vendors who committed resources, capital, and capacity to service the DISH build will continue to feel the pain in 2026. Tower companies are also exposed, though their contractual protections typically leave them in a better position than the contractor community.
The longer-term lesson the industry appears to have absorbed: the deal structure DISH received — the spectrum, the build-timeline accommodations, the favorable lease terms — reflects a moment in time that won’t repeat. No future market entrant should expect similar treatment from vendors, tower companies, or regulators. That window closed.
The Workforce Problem Gets Harder to Ignore
The flow of experienced, qualified people out of the wireless tower industry and into adjacent sectors — particularly data centers — is accelerating. The pay is better, the work is more predictable, and frankly, the treatment is often more professional.
Training programs will be promoted. The FCC will make the appropriate statements about workforce needs as 6G planning conversations gain momentum. The rhetoric will be familiar.
What will be different this time is the contractor community’s response. Conversations with experienced operators across the industry reveal a consistent theme: the economics of running a wireless services company are increasingly difficult to justify, and the people who built this wireless industry are running out of reasons to train the next generation for someone else’s benefit.
This is not a small problem. It is a slow-moving structural issue that will begin to affect project timelines, quality metrics, and the industry’s ability to meet build commitments in the second half of this decade. The industry should continue to have honest conversations about it.
Tower Valuations Stay Strong — But Capital Is Restless
Tower valuations will remain robust in 2026, supported by significant institutional capital that has identified towers, fiber, and data centers as a core infrastructure thesis.
The nuance worth understanding: it is significantly easier to deploy $50M into data centers or fiber than into towers. The deal flow simply isn’t there at the same scale. That dynamic keeps tower multiples elevated — there’s real competition for available assets — but it also means investors may increasingly redirect capital toward the other two legs of the infrastructure stool.
For tower owners considering a sale, the valuation environment remains favorable. For buyers, the scarcity of quality assets at reasonable prices is a growing constraint. We expect to see more transactions this year as sellers consider whether to take advantage of the “seller’s market” or hold and grow their portfolios toward higher TCF and higher price per tower.
AI Will Help and Hurt Landowners — Often at the Same Time
Artificial intelligence tools are becoming the first stop for landowners seeking to understand their leases, evaluate offers, and determine their rights. In many ways, this is a good thing — the fine print of a tower lease is genuinely complex, and having a tool that can explain it in plain language has real value.
The risk is that general AI guidance is exactly that — general. The chatbots will explain what a revenue share clause is. They won’t tell you whether your specific lease, in your specific market, with your specific carrier tenant, is above or below what the market would bear today. They tend to anchor on averages that may have little relationship to your actual situation.
Landowners who use AI to get smarter about their leases and then seek qualified, site-specific advice will be better off. Landowners who use AI in place of that advice will make worse decisions with greater misplaced confidence. Unfortunately, they won’t know until the interested lessee walks away and heads to a neighbor, or they learn later that they had a very desirable site worth much more.
The Convergence Play — Someone Figures Out the Bundled Site
This one is more speculative, but worth putting on record. The industry is abuzz about convergence- tying wireless to home broadband (FWA or fiber). Here we are talking about a different convergence play: merging tower sites with solar and/or BESS (battery energy storage system) and mini-data centers. So far, the edge data center at the tower site hasn’t worked out well for the tower companies. But that doesn’t mean it can’t.
If I were a tower developer, I would be leasing larger lease areas than historically needed. Getting zoning approval for a tower is difficult; adding BESS or compute at the base is relatively easy thereafter. Not for every site- but for those in suburban and rural areas near substations.
These predictions represent our informed perspective on the industry heading into 2026. They are not investment advice, legal guidance, or a substitute for qualified expertise on your specific situation — which is exactly the kind of help we provide. If any of these topics affect your tower lease or your business, we’d be glad to talk.
