PCIA 2014: Tower companies split on DAS

Orlando, Fla. – Tower developers at this week’s PCIA 2014 Wireless Infrastructure Show were not united in their assessment of the opportunity in distributed antenna systems. Larger players are investing heavily in DAS while smaller tower companies are focusing on macro sites, for the most part.
“Our small cell/DAS business is the largest in the U.S. market,” said Ben Moreland, CEO of Crown Castle, adding that Crown Castle has about 12,000 individual site nodes on the air, and a lot more under construction. “It’s a complementary business to the macro sites, one that we think fits well with our model of shared infrastructure,” he said.
“If we’re in a stadium or a basketball arena or some other public venue, we always build a system that’s co-locatable among all the carriers in the market, and then typically has a revenue share feature back to the venue owner,” Moreland explained. “It’s similar to what we do on the outdoor DAS side. We have a lot of nodes in an outdoor environment, whether it be a downtown urban core or a residential area or somewhere else where macro sites will not suffice for wireless capacity. We’re building a neutral host which is really the fiber-fed nodes – that’s the sharable element whether it’s the same pole or the next pole over. It’s really very similar to the tower market.”
Meanwhile, smaller tower developers told RCR Wireless News that macro sites offer plenty of opportunity right now and are more attractive than DAS.
“The DAS market is evolving,” said Alex Gellman, who was president of Global Tower Partners until AT&T bought that company last year. Gellman said he and his partners enjoy the tower business too much to consider retirement, so they have started Vertical Bridge Holdings. “We’re going to be focused on towers,” he said. “The tower market is a fantastic business model; it’s very difficult to replicate that good of a business model in other ancillary aspects of the business.”
Tower and DAS veteran Danny Agresta agreed. His ATP Towers is also focusing on macro sites rather than small cells or DAS. “I was in DAS for seven or eight years,” he said, referring to his role at American Tower, where he was in charge of finding and securing sites for DAS. “Between myself and one of my partners we have extensive DAS experience, but right now we’re focused on macro and working with carriers to improve their macro network.”
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