Crown Castle Inc. Goldman Sachs Communacopia + Technology Conference 2026

Thank you, Michael. It is great to be here.

Yeah, sure. It has obviously been a big year of change for Crown Castle. I am coming up on my one-year anniversary here next week, and I have to pinch myself sometimes to realize how much has gone on in that short period of time. Upon successfully closing the fiber and small cell business, we are, as you stated, the only pure-play U.S.-focused tower company publicly traded here in the U.S. We are now moving into the next phase of focus for us, which is all about maximizing organic growth, finding ways to invest in the systems and processes that will allow us to be more efficient and serve our customers better. This is a journey, and we are now starting to see some acceleration of embracing that long-term strategy of serving our customers here.

Is it slower? I think the year for us is unfolding very much as we anticipated.

This is a slightly back half of the year loaded plan for us in leasing. We're seeing a very traditional mix of amendments and first-time installs as we would expect from prior years.

We're sticking to the guidance that we provided earlier of range of $60 million-$70 million in new leasing. The way to think about our business is really in three different time periods. There's the here and now, which is really dictated by the MOAs we have in place with our customers, where we have visibility into the amendment-based activity and the new leasing that they will be required for this year's plan of record. A midterm catalyst from our perspective is the recent EchoStar sale of the 600 MHz to AT&T. If you'll recall, they were able to take advantage very quickly of the 3.45 GHz spectrum that they deployed, which was primarily software upgrades, albeit that will eventually lead with capacity to new radios being deployed as well. The 600 MHz is a new technology that AT&T isn't currently deploying.

These antennas are quite large. I am 6'3", they are quite a bit taller than I am. We saw the equipment out at Mobile World Congress this year, and this will be a midterm catalyst. Then I think longer term, the 800 MHz of 6G spectrum that is being made available. The first tranche will be the Upper C-band. This will really fuel the next 5 to 10 years of growth for Crown and the industry as a whole. We are excited about where this is headed. In general, any time new spectrum has been made available, it is typically a good omen for the tower industry as a whole.

Yeah. Maybe start by just acknowledging the leadership of Chairman Carr in making the spectrum available for lobbying within the administration. The policy to actually have the 800 MHz for 6G is very significant given the most recent activity in the industry. Typically, when spectrum will come to auction, there are a couple of things that, and once the auction is over, a couple of things come into play. One is, many times the spectrum is encumbered by the existing legacy users. You will need to go and typically relocate them off that spectrum. Then in the case of Upper C-band as an example, one of the things that we saw in the Lower C-band in the time that this was originally deployed by both Verizon and AT&T, there were some issues with interference with some of the altimeters.

The key takeaway, I think, for investors to understand, which is, where there is a will, there is a way, and the carriers have almost always found a way to clear the spectrum faster by throwing a little bit of money at the problem, and then they have been able to design engineering solutions around the issues like the altimeter. So think 2 years max, but oftentimes it can be quite a bit faster based on the needs of the networks and the high rate of data growth across the industry.