American Tower Corporation TD Cowen 12th Annual Communications Infrastructure Summit
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All right, let's get started. Thank you very much. Good afternoon. My name is Greg Williams. I cover cable, wireless, and comm infra here at TD Cowen. I am joined in this session by Rich Rossi, the Executive Vice President and President of the U.S. Tower Division of American Tower. Rich, thanks for joining us.
Yeah, thanks for having me.
Before we start talking about the U.S. carrier activity, et cetera, the elephant in the room from earlier last week was about SpaceX. They said more specifically, we can sort of figure out a network topology using femtocells, putting them around homes and their dishes, or putting them even in Tesla cars. I just wanted to maybe vet that a little bit with your opinion on what that would mean. Would that disenfranchise any towers? Just your general thoughts on that. I know there is a lot more questions than there are answers to that.
Yeah. Your thoughts would be appreciated.
Sure. I think that when you look at build-outs in the U.S., macro sites have always been the backbone, and we think that they're going to remain the backbone. While there may be other types of infrastructure that are used to help get networks into targeted locations, urban areas, or really fixed sites, macro sites will always be that backbone. There may be ambitions or plans to do something that pivots in a different direction, but at the end of the day, it comes down to deployment time, cost, efficiency, and that's when you're going to come back to companies like ours. We think ultimately if there is a large network deployment in the U.S., that we're going to play a big part of that and Sure ready to do it.
Absolutely. Just transitioning over to the U.S. carriers, how would you describe the current activity environment across the big three? As part of that, are you seeing any signs of acceleration or deceleration in your application activity?
Yeah. We're still right in the thick of things with 5G, and I would describe it as consistent. If you were to look at 2025 versus 2026, our new business growth was about 2.5%, that component of our algorithm. We're seeing that again in 2026. While you do have a couple of carriers who are working their way towards the end of their mid-band deployment We are seeing densification pick up.
It takes a different mix of activity, but you're largely seeing the same output as it pertains to our growth. I think it's consistent, and it's where we thought we were going to be at this phase of 5G. Moving out of that initial paint the map coverage phase and more into how you solve for capacity. Obviously the capacity demand continues to increase dramatically year-over-year on mobile networks. Depending on what you look at, there are predictions it'll double by the end of the decade, maybe sooner. We're seeing the carriers aggressively respond to that type of demand.
Got it. Some of the carriers are moving from coverage to capacity. I imagine then the way it looks from your revenue perspective, it shifts from amendments to colocation then. Is that on a carrier basis or market by market basis? Is that broad? How would you describe the mix shift?
It's a little bit carrier to carrier because they're all in different phases of their journey in terms of how they're going to get 5G rolled out. What you see is the amendments still drive a lot of the activity just based on sheer volume of amendments compared to how many new locations you see. You start to see an increasing share of new co-locations, and that really is the best indicator for densification given that a lot of those co-locations occur in markets where you have mature networks that have been rolled out for years.
You know it's a capacity play versus just a straight coverage need.
Got it. So maybe you are seeing a little more co-lo in the NFL cities first.
Yeah, you are going to see capacity addressed from the urban areas moving out. So you may see different types of infrastructure, rooftops, building facades, small cells in the urban areas.
Then you get to our sweet spot, which would be suburban and moving out from there.
That is where the macro towers really play the big role.
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