In a surprise ruling, the FCC determined that a landowner was responsible for removing a 375’ guyed tower on their property after the broadcaster that built it (and subsequent broadcast owners) failed to do so. Because the tower exceeds 200’, it is required to be lit for aircraft safety. However, the tower lights apparently had […]
The wireless carriers are actively seeking to add right-of-first-refusal clauses (ROFR) to their new and extended cell site lease agreements. Verizon includes standard ROFR language in its cell tower leases that gives them the right to match other offers. The language is overly broad and as such, many landowners don’t like it. As it was, […]
Radio Frequency energy or RF has been in the news and is not likely to go away. Between 5G and COVID-19 conspiracies and more antennas RF will continue to be a hot button topic. How can you educate yourself? There are a few online resources, free of charge, with reputable RF energy information. However, they […]
Some landowners with AT&T towers on their property are being contacted by Octagon Towers. Octagon Towers asks the landowner to either extend the AT&T lease or consent to assignment by AT&T to Octagon. Read further to know what you should do about these requests.
What is “future consent” you might ask? It is when a tower company asks for consent before they actually need it. In this case, Crown Castle is sending letters like the one below to landowners who have leases that require consent before something is allowed to happen. SItuations that might require consent include modifications to […]
Verizon’s site acquisition agent reached out to our client to propose a “swap of (9) existing radios with (9) new radios”. They suggested to the client that there should be no rent increase for these modifications as it is just replacement of existing radios which care also known as remote radio units or RRU’s. On […]
Coupled with low cost of capital and their recent conversions to REITs, tower companies have every incentive to convert leases (long term operating expense) to easements (upfront capital expenditure).
One of our clients received a proposal from a tower company that included a revenue share clause. Generally, revenue shares are not proposed by wireless carriers and even less so by tower companies. However, because our client is a governmental entity, I assume the tower company figured it would be better to put a revenue […]
Every year, we put together our prognostications for the coming year. This year, we are obviously a little late – primarily because the beginning of the year has been very active for SITA. In the final days of 2017, I drafted a “State of SITA” email to our staff, predicting that 2018 would be the […]
We had heard previously that AT&T wasn’t willing to allow lease optimization firms to send out letters on its letterhead without disclosing that the letter did not include actually come from the AT&T. A client just received a letter though that clearly does not include anything identifying that Md7 (a lease optimization company) is […]