Crown Castle could see incremental revenues from LightSquared deal

Crown Castle International Corp. (CCI) said it could see incremental revenue from LightSquared as part of its multi-year Network Vision plan signed with Sprint Nextel Corp. The deal establishes uniform rates for deploying sites rather than negotiating tower contracts on a site-by-site basis, and also establishes the process, but doesn’t guarantee any future amount of amendment activity, Crown CEO W. Ben Moreland said in a second-quarter earnings conference call today.
Sprint Nextel and LightSquared announced a long-rumored network-hosting agreement today.
Crown increased its full-year guidance on strong second-quarter earnings. The tower company expects full-year site rental revenue to be between $1.84 billion and $1.85 billion. Moreland said the company is thrilled that all three top wireless operators are aggressively building out advanced networks in order to meet increased consumer demand. The company would not release pricing details of its Network Vision deal with Sprint, or incremental revenue from LightSquared, in part because it said other operators could be part of the agreement going forward. Crown is Sprint’s largest tower provider. The Network Vision deal covers 10,000 towers.
The tower company said it is averaging just over three tenants per tower in the United States. Crown said it could see increased activity in Australia, where it owns 1,600 towers, in 2012.
Although distributed antenna systems (DAS) are not a significant part of Crown’s overall revenues, the company continues to see growth in the sector, and expects to spend about $50 million this year on DAS deployments