Tower Forum Breaks Down the Infrastructure Landscape
Article from Inside Towers
The inaugural Tower & Fiber Forum roundtable met yesterday at Mobile World Congress (MWA) 2022 in Las Vegas discussing some of the major topics affecting the world of communications infrastructure. Former WIA CEO Jonathan Adelstein, now Managing Director and Head of Global Policy and Public Investment for DigitalBridge; Chaz Kramer, VP of Product Management for Zayo; Tom Leddo, Chief Strategy Officer for MD7 and Jesse Nichols, Managing Director for Houlihan Lokey made up the panelist roster. Among the topics were new cell site rollouts, macro vs small cells, operator OPEX plans and managing the underlying real assets, such as leases/contracts/data, for the 5G era.
“As more and more cell sites are required, we must get the foundation of the lease agreements in advanced digital form so we can manage them proactively, and get ever-increasing property costs under control,” Leddo said. “MD7 has worked with over 60 operators across North America and Europe, and we see a constant need to manage the underlying real property that houses their networks proactively. It’s becoming more and more urgent, as 5G requires hundreds of thousands of new cell sites.”
Adelstein said with economic uncertainty comes opportunity for the wireless infrastructure market which, in his opinion, is as volatile a market as he’s seen since 2000. “But we have one of the more stable real estate markets in our industry,” he said, “because of the strong credit of the tenants, high multiples and increasing cap rates.”
The panel discussed how to best manage the volatility in the market as it faced a myriad of challenges such as labor shortages, workforce development, large influxes of federal funding and shifting demand. They saw smaller vendors getting squeezed by the erratic conditions and lack of stability particularly with supply chain problems and getting needed equipment and materials in time. A panelist commented that getting fiber can be a year down the road so planning in advance is key to survival.
With the release of torrents of federal money, Adelstein said he thought overbuilding could also be a problem. “It’s going to take some serious planning from network builders,” he said. “They will have to manage all of this in an agile way.”
Nichols discussed how Houlihan Lokey’s Digital Infrastructure team was very active throughout 2021 having provided counsel on more than 25 transactions that totaled approximately $13 billion. He said not all activity was focused on macro towers but data centers, digital infrastructure services, and communications software as well.
