Tuesday, July 17, 2007

Think there are too many cell towers in the US?


I read a fascinating article about the increase in the number of cell phone towers in India. According to this article in the Economic Times- there are currently 110,000 cell phone towers in India currently - however, there will be 90,000 added for 2007 and another 90,000 added for 2008. Compare this with the 180,000 or so cell phone towers in the United States currently, and the 15,000 to 20,000 that will be added each year in 2007 to 2008.

To put this in perspective, the US is 3.5 million square miles- while India is only 1.25 million square miles. Yet the population of India is 1.1 billion people- in the US, 330 million. (from wikipedia) 3 times the people, 1/3 of the land mass.

No wonder SBA, Crown Castle, American Tower are all interested in India.

Labels: , , , ,

posted by Steel in the Air @ 9:55 AM 1 comments

Friday, June 29, 2007

American Tower Corp tower ground space targeted by opportunists


A client of our was approached by a site acquisition agent who they mistakenly thought was a representative of American Tower Corporation. American Tower leases space on their property for a tower. Due to the physical size of the building and the small size of the parcel, there is not much room remaining for expansion.

The site acquisition agent offered to sign a lease with the landowner to allow for future expansion for wireless collocations on the American Tower site. The problem is that this wasn't an American Tower Corporation rep. We believe that the site acquisition agent was simply trying to get a below market lease from the landowner so that they could turn around and release the space to the next wireless carrier who was going to collocate on the American Tower site. This particular landowner thought the representative was from American Tower but after we investigated further, it was clear that they weren't.


If the site acquisition agent was willing to pay for the lease, this might not have been so bad. Instead, they wanted an indefinate option to lease. In other words, they would not have to pay any rent until they chose to which would only occur when American Tower corp added another tenant and found that there was no expansion room for the ground lease.


We don't know for sure whether this was only a one time only thing- but we suspect that it wasn't. If it wasn't, then it appears that cell site ground lessors have yet one more group of people that they don't want to be contacted by.

Labels: , ,

posted by Steel in the Air @ 1:18 PM 0 comments