5 things to know today …
1. The small cell opportunity for commercial property owners continues to grow. Vertical Bridge has made a deal to manage wireless sites at 250 real estate investment trust-owned health care facilities. Welltower is a REIT that funds real estate infrastructure for senior living centers and other health care operations, and Vertical Bridge sees opportunities for both small cells and macro sites at these locations. The Welltower deal is the latest in a string of partnerships for Vertical Bridge, which has also partnered with Hudson Pacific, Love’s, IHeartMedia, Clear Channel Outdoor Americas, Townsquare Media, CiG Wireless, U.S. Cellular and Nsight Tower Holdings. Vertical Bridge now owns or manages 42,000 sites. The company is an affiliate of Digital Bridge Holdings, which also owns a controlling interest in ExteNet Systems.
2. Ascom and Ranplan are joining forces to market Ranplan’s IBuildNet through Ascom Network Testing. The Ranplan tool uses 3D modeling and radio propagation simulation to design and optimize indoor and outdoor networks. The British company is a direct competitor to Canada’s IBwave, which was recently purchased by Corning, but continues to operate as an independent company. Ascom Network Testing is a subsidiary of Ascom, a Swiss company that specializes in wireless connectivity solutions for health care providers. The company markets test and measurement solutions under the TEMS brand. Ascom Network Testing and Ranplan will call their combined solution TEMS IBuildNet.
3. The battle of the balls continued this weekend, with Sprint launching its own advertisement showing colorful animated balls traveling down a chute while a voiceover touts the Sprint network’s “faster download speeds than Verizon, AT&T and T-Mobile based on data from an independent third party.” Verizon Wireless got the ball rolling last month with an ad detailing the results of the latest RootMetrics survey. T-Mobile US followed suit with two ads of its own, the latest of which points out that T-Mobile US’ LTE network now reaches “almost everyone Verizon does.”
4. Twitter appears to have several job openings at the highest levels, with four key executives leaving the company. Alex Roetter, Skip Schipper, Katie Stanton and Kevin Weil are all leaving less than four months after Twitter founder Jack Dorsey returned to the company to take over as Twitter’s CEO. Dorsey said all four executives chose to lead and thanked them all for their service.
5. BT is under pressure from members of Parliament to sell its Openreach Internet business. The lawmakers are saying despite major subsidies from the British taxpayers, Openreach is not offering broadband to all citizens and that millions of people in the U.K. still cannot get online. BT is trying to merge with mobile operator EE, and regulators may call for a sale of Openreach as a condition of that deal.
