Crown Castle closes on $115M purchase of NewPath Networks

Crown Castle International Corp. (CCI) closed on its previously announced acquisition of NewPath Networks Inc. Crown paid $115 million for the Distributed Antenna Systems (DAS) networks provider, adding 35 DAS networks to Crown’s portfolio.
As part of the acquisition, Mike Kavanagh, co-founder and CEO of NewPath, has been named president of DAS operations at Crown Castle. “We are pleased to be combining the NewPath and Crown Castle DAS teams to capture opportunities in the market and provide customized infrastructure solutions to wireless carriers,” Kavanagh said.
“Increasingly, we believe that distributed antenna systems will be an important complement to traditional tower installations,” said Ben Moreland, Crown Castle president and CEO. In its second-quarter earnings results, Crown said it expected to have 44 DAS networks operating or under construction once the acquisition closed.
DAS networks are increasingly popular in dense urban environments as operators seek to add capacity or increase coverage in those environments. DAS solutions work in tandem with macro cellular tower builds, rather than compete with them. DAS networks are often used by service providers that cannot get siting permission for a traditional tower, for carriers that want better in-building coverage, or to expand capacity and coverage in a particular area. They are also used by carriers with less spectrum that want to get to market quickly like Leap Wireless International Inc. and MetroPCS Communications Inc.