Our 2022 Predictions for the Wireless Industry

Steel in the Air’s 2022 Predictions for Cell Tower Leasing and Valuation. While 2021 certainly impacted many industries negatively, the wireless industry wasn’t one of them. This past year was a particularly strong year for tower companies and landowners. Looking forward into 2022, we see more of the same. Wireless Service Provider Predictions. Wireless service […]

AT&T Terminated 630 Cell Sites in 2019

AT&T (via BlackDot), is contacting tower owners and landowners and trying to convince them to renegotiate their leases.  If you have read our previous content- there isn’t much new to this renegotiation story except for the following letter that they provided to one of our clients. The highlighted part is the interesting part- AT&T claims […]

Who is Octagon Towers, LLC?

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.

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

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 […]

Desperate to Get Back at the Tower Companies: The Verizon, AT&T, and Tillman Infrastructure JV

Yesterday, in a surprise press release by Verizon, Verizon indicated that it had formed a joint venture with AT&T and Tillman Infrastructure to develop “hundreds” of communication towers with “the potential for significantly more new site locations in the future”.  Tillman Infrastructure is relatively new to the US- but owns a few thousand towers in […]

Not So Fast- California Governor Vetoes Small Cell Bill.

Sunday night, California Governor Jerry Brown vetoed a contentious statewide small cell bill (SB649) which is one of many similar bills already passed in eleven other states. The bill would have removed local control over the placement of small cells and would have limited the fees that municipalities could charge for access to municipal pole […]

What’s Happened So Far in Wireless in 2017?

As we look back over the first half of 2017, there has been much non-activity on the merger front. Many people (myself included) expected greater merger and acquisition activity but other than a few fiber related transactions, nothing material has transpired. Sprint and T-Mobile are still separate companies, and DISH has not merged with or […]

AT&T’s Brilliant Strategy to Double Dip from Public Funding to Build a Better Wireless Network (Investor Research Note from Steel in the Air)

We have been getting a lot of questions from investors related to FirstNet equipment and the potential impact on TowerCos, with most questions pertaining to the timing and revenue from amendment activity from FirstNet antenna modifications. You may recall that in AT&T FirstNet Revisited, we reviewed the impact of AT&T winning the FirstNet RFP and the […]