The tax relief and jobs bill passed by Congress earlier this month may speed the process of tower and base station upgrades. In addition to freeing up more spectrum for wireless broadband, the bill would make it harder for city governments to deny tower...
SBA Communications (SBAC) said it plans to pay nearly $1.1 billion to acquire certain affiliates of Mobilitie, including more than 2,300 tower sites in the United States and Central America and certain indoor and outdoor distributed antenna systems in Chicago, Las Vegas, New York...
One of the most developed countries in Latin America, Chile faces very similar telecom challenges to Brazil, Colombia and Mexico. Its mobile penetration surpassed one device per habitant, reaching 120.8% in June, with most subscribers on prepaid plans. The Chile wireless market is also...
Forget about the Colombia you may know from the 1990s. The current scenario is different and much more business friendly than in the past. The government’s plan to boost telecommunications in the country is set to increase competition among operators and expedite the deployment...
Global Tower Partners (GTP) says it now has the nation's largest aggregation of railroad rights of way available for tower development and leasing. Today the company announced that it has partnered with Regional Rail LLC, OmniTRAX, Patriot Rail Corp., and Morristown & Erie Railway...
American Tower Corp. (NYSE: AMT) hopes its decision to reorganize as a real estate investment trust will help its stock continue its upward trend, and the company has already picked up new support on Wall Street. Within the past month, Wedbush Securities, Stifel Nicolaus and...
One segment expected to benefit from AT&T’s (T) decision to drop its acquisition bid of T-Mobile USA is the tower market, which for the past several months has waited on news of how a combined AT&T Mobility/T-Mobile USA would impact their operations.
Now, that the...
Verizon Wireless’ LTE in Rural America program is inching closer to fruition with the news that Pioneer Cellular has recently completed end-to-end data testing using its recently deployed network. That network uses upper-band, C-Block 700 MHz spectrum assets licensed from Verizon Wireless running over...
The nation's largest tower operator is making a major investment in distributed antenna systems. Crown Castle International (NYSE: CCI) says it will purchase NextG Networks Inc. for roughly $1 billion from a private equity group led by Madison Dearborn Partners. With more than 7,000...
American Tower (NYSE: AMT) expanded its presence in Africa signing a deal to form a joint venture with MTN Group to acquire nearly 1,000 tower sites from MTN Group’s subsidiary in Uganda for $175 million. The towers will be controlled and managed by the...
Global Tower Partners said it has signed an agreement with Brookfield Real Estate Opportunity Fund to manage and lease 41 properties to wireless carriers as prospective co-location sites.
As part of the agreement, GTP has secured 4.5 million square feet of distributed antenna system rights...
The need to bolster LTE networks could result in more than 14 million radio transceivers being deployed in 2016, with half of those specific to the mobile broadband technology, according to a new report from Mobile Experts.
The firm said that the increase in LTE...
While smartphones continue to make great strides in penetrating the domestic market, the third quarter of this year saw a slight lull in the action as consumers awaited the latest offering from Apple, according to a report by Fitch Ratings.
The report found that during...
Northern Kentucky University students are complaining that their cell coverage on campus is effectively unusable. According to the school's student paper, the 15,000-student university is considering installation of a distributed antenna system, or DAS. The way the student paper discusses the problem, it's not...
A new report from Juniper Research predicts that while LTE uptake over the next five years will be swift, the technology will have only a limited global reach and account for a small fraction of the worldwide mobile base.
Juniper predicts LTE networks will garner...
Technology upgrades and spectrum management are a fact of life for mobile operators that are having to constantly update networks and rearrange spectrum assets in order to continuing serving growing customer demand and keep up with competitors in the marketing wars.
However, few carriers take...
DALLAS – Leap Wireless’ senior vice president of strategy, Bill Ingram, threw down the gauntlet on his rivals during a keynote address at this year’s LTE North America event in Dallas, challenging his competitors to band together in their attempts to remain competitive in...
Matthew Myers faces winds of up to 110 MPH atop a 12,000 foot mountain peak as he deploys, installs and maintains cell phone towers for Union Wireless in Colorado. When he heard about Anritsu Company's Toughest Site Competition, he knew his sites could qualify....
American Tower (NYSE: AMT) bucked the downward trend on Wall Street today, rising on a strong earnings report and an improved financial outlook for the year. The Boston-based wireless infrastructure company said full-year EBDITA should be about $1.59 billion, $20 million higher than its...
Self-organizing networks (SON) is a key element of next generation radio access networks, especially LTE where SON techniques are an integral part of the LTE specifications. While SON in the RAN network has been defined through organizations like 3GPP and NGMN, SON in the mobile backhaul space remains undefined. Here, I like to present my take on what SON means in the context of small cell mobile backhaul where SON techniques are set to play a prominent role.
After decades of “holy wars” surrounding cellular technologies, common ground seems to have been made around the LTE standard. Virtually all carriers around the world have said they plan on moving towards the standard at some point in the network evolution path regardless of...
Sprint Nextel’s recent announcement that it planned to begin deploying LTE services across its network as part of its Network Vision initiative was not a surprise to most industry observers as the industry in general is moving in that direction. What did catch some...
Crown Castle, the largest U.S. tower owner, said network upgrades by Verizon Wireless, AT&T Mobility and Sprint Nextel boosted earnings in the third quarter of 2011. For the quarter, recurring cash flow increased 12% to $199 million. Recurring cash flow is defined as adjusted...
Regional wireless operator C Spire Wireless said it would spend an additional $10 million on top of the $90 million announced last month to expand mobile broadband services to 61 cities and 65 counties across its coverage areas in portions of Mississippi, Alabama and...
