Cell Tower and Wireless Telecommunications Blog

Since 2004, Steel in the Air has served over 3,000 clients, reviewed over 10,000 cellular leases and tracked over 2,000 lease buyout offers. We represent private landowners, corporate property owners and public entities in lease negotiations against wireless carriers and tower companies. We also consult on cell site and cell tower valuation and brokerage. Our cell tower and cell site database has grown to encompass over 285,000 cell site locations nationwide.

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DISH’s NB-IOT Network Plans- More than Just a License Saver Design?

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As pointed out by Inside Towers, construction drawings for a DISH NB-IOT installation are available here. We reviewed the drawings carefully and have some observations.

What is DISH installing?

DISH appears to be using one 3' satellite dish for backhaul purposes. The drawings include a designation that a second location must be available on the platform.

 

DISH is using Ericsson equipment with battery backup.

DISH's equipment and lease area is 5' 3" x 7' 0".

DISH is installing 3 larger tri-band panel antennas made by Comba along with 8 remote radio units. The antennas are being installed as high as possible on this particular 225' tower which makes sense for an NB-IOT installation.

This particular installation is on an SBA tower- we have heard that SBA is getting a sizeable portion of the initial round of DISH installations. We will confirm that later as more requests come in.

What does this mean for tower owners, investors, and landowners?

For tower owners, any new company adding collocations to existing towers is welcome. The collocation amounts to additional revenue, although expectations are tempered because of the lower number of DISH sites that will be deployed initially in an effort to keep their FCC frequency licenses. Private tower owners won't stand to benefit as much as public tower owners- primarily because it appears that DISH is focusing on deploying sites quickly which is best done by a master lease agreement with public tower companies. Because NB-IOT doesn't require the same degree of location specificity as traditional cellular, DISH has more flexibility in terms of optimizing cost and speed as opposed to location. The real question left outstanding is when and if DISH intends to install a full-blown network- which we won't likely know for some time.

For Landowners, unless your ground lease is with a public tower company and it has a revenue share component in it, you won't likely see any additional rent. Some building owners in urban areas may see some limited interest especially on taller buildings.

For Investors, while this is slightly positive to the public tower companies, the initial number of sites isn't significant enough to get excited about. There isn't likely a significant upgrade path for these sites, so amendment activity in the future may be limited. For DISH, it is too early to tell what this means. The site design is indicative that DISH has plans to operate an actual network, but whether DISH actually deploys enough sites to have a robust NB-IOT network remains to be seen.

AT&T Wants to Buy Your Tower! (Well, Not Really)

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A client of ours owns more than a few cell towers that have AT&T as a collocation tenant.  They recently received this letter, yet another in a long line of letters that threaten the tower owner with some dire consequence if they don't renegotiate or sell their tower to AT&T.   

In this case, the threat is somewhat comical.  "The sale of your tower to certain parties may result in AT&T sending a non-renewal notice regarding our lease."  How is that a threat?   If a tower owner has already sold the tower to a third party, why would they care whether AT&T sends a non-renewal notice?  Perhaps AT&T's thought is that if the seller needs to get an estoppel from AT&T regarding its lease to present to the buyer, that AT&T's can thwart the sale of the tower by instead sending a notice of non-renewal? 

In our experience, most buyers don't really care whether a notice of non-renewal is sent, provided that there is enough term remaining before they can choose not to renew or if the tower is located in an area with zoning regulations that prohibit construction of new towers near existing towers.

The other comical part is that AT&T (through its' financial supplier) is asking for lease information about each tower so that the financial supplier can process the information and make an offer.  Of course, AT&T then also has information about other subleases that the tower owner has on your tower which can be used against the tower owner in future lease negotiations.  

If you are inclined to sell your tower, reach out to us and we can give you a free back of the napkin estimate of the value of the tower.  We won't use your information against you and we won't threaten you with sending laughable notice's of non-renewal in order to get you to sell.  If you aren't interested in selling but feel like you need some help in addressing these threats from AT&T, please call us to discuss your situation further.  

 

Sprint’s Really Odd Antenna Configuration Proposal

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On one of our municipal client's towers, Sprint submitted a request to replace three existing antennas with new antennas that add 2.5GHz capability to their equipment.  The subject tower is in a difficult zoning jurisdiction and one where Sprint really doesn't have any other options.   Their collocation rent was on the higher side but not unreasonably so- and the three other wireless service providers were all paying the same or higher rent.  

Because the antennas were the same size or smaller, we did not recommend a rent increase for them.  However, Sprint was adding remote radio units and other equipment so we recommended a fairly nominal increase.  Rather than accept the newly proposed lease terms, Sprint instead asked whether they could replace the existing equipment on the tower with three of these antennas and get a reduction in rent. 

Sprint Proposed Canister Antennas
Possible Sprint Replacement Antennas

The proposed antennas are larger than the existing antennas, but Sprint appears to be wanting to go from 9 panels to 3 of these antennas.  (Not 3 of the canisters)  These panels will accommodate all of Sprint's spectrum bands but would seemingly limit their capacity and number of simultaneous users.   These appear more suitable for a mini-macro as opposed to a macrocell, but I would welcome any thoughts readers have regarding this topic.  

At the end of the day, we advised the client that the value of their tower is its unique location, not the specific loading that Sprint is placing or removing from the tower.   Obviously, there will be situations where a reduction in loading or equipment would justify a reduction in lease rate, but this isn't one of them.