AT&T inks new site-lease deal with Crown Castle, cites benefits for FirstNet, 5G deployments

In November 2017, AT&T and Verizon announced a collaboration effort with Tillman Infrastructure to build hundreds of new towers on which the carriers would be anchor tenants. Terms of the deal were not released, but AT&T’s Johnson stated that “we need more alternatives to the traditional leasing model” at the time of the Tillman announcement.

Although the specifics of the Crown Castle agreements have not been shared, there is an expectation within the wireless community that the deal moves toward the AT&T goal of a real-estate model to some degree, according to Ken Rehbehn, principal analyst at Critical Communications Insights.

“This has been a long-running program by AT&T to secure the important concessions that are needed for economic operation,” Rehbehn said during an interview with IWCE’s Urgent Communications. “With this agreement, you have to conclude that AT&T received enough of what they were looking for—in terms of improvements to the site lease agreements—to move forward.”

Crown Castle’s considerable small-cell site assets may have put it in a better position to negotiate a flexible arrangement with AT&T than other tower companies may have in the future, Rehbehn said.

“Not every tower company has the breadth of small-cell deployment that Crown Castle has,” Rehbehn said. “Logic suggests that the need for a large volume of site installations to support increased capacity with LTE, as well as 5G small cells, creates an opportunity for Crown Castle—and, as a result, room for maneuvering when it comes to lease terms for the macro sites.”