Crown Castle at Global Communications Infrastructure Conference: Strategic U.S. Tower Focus

On Wednesday, 17 September 2025, Crown Castle International Corp (NYSE:CCI) participated in the Global Communications Infrastructure Conference. The discussion, led by CFO Sunit Patel, highlighted Crown Castle’s strategic focus on U.S. towers, following the divestment of its fiber and small cell businesses. While the company projects growth driven by 5G deployments and mobile data demand, it also acknowledged challenges such as high-rent relocations. The company remains optimistic about its future, emphasizing shareholder value through dividends and share buybacks.

Key Takeaways

• Crown Castle is focusing on a U.S. tower-only strategy after selling its fiber and small cell businesses.
• The company raised its guidance in the second quarter, driven by strong leasing activity.
• $6 billion from the divestiture will be used for debt paydown, with the rest allocated to share repurchases.
• Crown Castle expects continued growth in mobile data demand, potentially accelerated by AI technologies.
• The regulatory environment is viewed as favorable, supporting spectrum auctions and permitting processes.

Financial Results

• Crown Castle increased its guidance for the second quarter, reflecting robust leasing activity.
• The company plans to use $8.5 billion from the sale of its fiber and small cell businesses, with $6 billion dedicated to debt reduction and the remainder for share buybacks.
• The dividend policy remains strong, with plans to distribute 75% to 80% of AFFO in dividends.

Operational Updates

• New CEO Chris LeBrun joins Crown Castle with a focus on execution and delivery, particularly in completing the divestiture and enhancing operational efficiencies.
• The company emphasizes its commitment to maintaining an investment-grade credit rating.
• Crown Castle is investing in platforms and systems to drive efficiencies and become best-in-class.

Future Outlook

• 5G deployments continue to be a significant growth driver, as clients focus on coverage and intensity.
• Crown Castle sees AI as a potential catalyst for increased mobile data demand.
• The company remains confident in its long-term contracts, including a stable agreement with DISH through 2036.

Q&A Highlights

• CFO Sunit Patel views AT&T’s $23 billion spectrum purchase as a positive development for the tower sector.
• Satellite technology is considered a niche market for IoT and rural applications but not a replacement for terrestrial networks.
• The company is optimistic about its current agreements and the potential for continued growth despite challenges.

In conclusion, Crown Castle’s strategic focus on U.S. towers and its commitment to shareholder value position it well for future growth. For more detailed insights, refer to the full transcript.

Full transcript - Global Communications Infrastructure Conference:

John Akin, Analyst, RBC: I’m John Akin with RBC, and I’m pleased to be spending the next 20 minutes at fireside with the Chief Financial Officer of Crown Castle, Sunit Patel. Welcome, Sunit.

Sunit Patel, Chief Financial Officer, Crown Castle: Thank you. Glad to be here.

John Akin, Analyst, RBC: You go a long way back and have an interesting perspective as both a Board Member, more recently CFO, but also having had important roles at T-Mobile and Lumen and going way back, other startups like Lincoln Glass Networks. I am interested in just perspectives given recent announcements. Let’s start with the AT&T purchase of spectrum from EchoStar from a couple of weeks back. Any thoughts on how that affects mobile infrastructure usage and spending, as well as maybe how it might affect Crown Castle specifically?

Sunit Patel, Chief Financial Officer, Crown Castle: Yeah. You mentioned the time when I was at T-Mobile in charge of putting T-Mobile and Sprint together. That transaction resulted in T-Mobile gaining a lot of mid-band spectrum, which they’ve leveraged to the hilt in terms of 5G deployment. When I look at this most recent announcement of AT&T spending $23 billion to buy spectrum, I think that’s a big signal because it’s a big capital allocation shift. While you hear about AT&T and Verizon doing both fiber to the home bets, this clearly says that wireless data matters. It matters a lot, whether you look at the price of the spectrum on a per megahertz pop, or whether you look at the amount of money they’re spent and also realizing this is just a down payment before you deploy the spectrum.

From our perspective, from a tower perspective, I think that’s good generally, because I also think that with the other carriers, they also have to think about their position in terms of their network leadership. Network leadership is defined by several key elements. What’s your coverage? How many towers are you on? What’s the throughput? What’s the speed you’re providing to the consumer? What’s the throughput in terms of actual bits handled per tower or network quality? All those are important metrics to keep your churn low and keep going with mobile people that, you know, all of us use our phones. I think probably the key takeaway is that it’s good for the tower sector. I also think it puts some of the other carriers on the defensive looking at their position and what they are going to do to respond. I see it as a plus for us.

John Akin, Analyst, RBC: Not to get too technical, but we’ll talk about AT&T, EchoStar, which we just chatted about a little bit. Later on, I want to get a little bit into SpaceX, which is the more recent headline. Maybe taking a step back, there’s been some management changes. There’s some corporate events around divestitures of small cells and fiber. Tell us about the new CEO. I think this might be his second day on the job.

Sunit Patel, Chief Financial Officer, Crown Castle: That’s right. Chris LeBrun joined us this Monday. It’s day three for him. I would say we’re pleased. As you know, the company’s been through quite a few changes. Chris most recently was running Vantage Towers, which is a very large tower operator in Europe. He’s got great mobile industry ecosystem experience. He was at T-Mobile for many years in charge of deploying some of their networks, mobile data networks regionally. He was at Ericsson, Samsung, and now at Vantage. We’re pleased he’s joining us on the board. As you know, we’ve been through a couple of CEO changes, excited about it. He’s had very deep operating experience. With respect to the fiber sale and small cell business, I was on the board early last year. I was on the Fiber Review Committee and a couple of other committees.

We’re glad to get that concluded, which now allows us to focus on being just a U.S. tower-only company. Obviously, Chris is aligned with that strategy. We are excited about what it means for our investors going forward.

John Akin, Analyst, RBC: Strategy seems clear. The decks were cleared before he was selected. Is his role mainly around execution and delivery, or are there other types of directions that we could see Crown Castle going into as a pure-play mobile infrastructure company?

Sunit Patel, Chief Financial Officer, Crown Castle: I think the strategy of being a U.S. tower-only operator is clear. Clearly, there are some execution things ahead. We have to complete and conclude the sale of the fiber and the small cell business. We think that there are dis-synergies in operating three businesses versus one business. We think we’ll continue to be able to drive some operating expense efficiencies. Finally, something we’ve talked about before, we think that some small investments in our platforms and systems will also allow us to drive to be the best-in-class operator. Going beyond that over the next year or two, I think we obviously want to make sure we are focused on driving growth for our business. We think there’s a lot happening right here in the U.S. We think there’ll be possibilities there too.

John Akin, Analyst, RBC: Looking to the most recent quarter and current operating trends in your tower business, maybe just kind of refresh us on where we are on things like organic tenant billings growth, churn, and what types of activity levels are starting to ramp or decelerate, for that matter.

Sunit Patel, Chief Financial Officer, Crown Castle: As you saw, we did increase our guidance in the second quarter. Our clients continue to be quite active. You see that in us raising the guidance on our leasing activity. What we see today is our clients continuing to focus on 5G deployments, coverage, comparative intensity has increased. You can see that in churn levels with the wireless operators’ results. We also have been working on operating efficiencies. You saw we did better on our SG&A expense outlook. We are focused on process improvements. Our cycle times improved, which also helped the revenue line.

John Akin, Analyst, RBC: Any kind of trends you’re seeing around data growth, 5G use cases, AI, FWA that kind of inform your view around either this year’s guide or obviously you haven’t communicated it, but how you’re thinking internally about the medium term?

Sunit Patel, Chief Financial Officer, Crown Castle: Yeah, I think our view is that 5G deployment is going to continue. There’s still room to go over the next number of years. Fixed wireless certainly has been a plus on the margin. When you talk about AI, I think we’re still at the very, very early stages. I don’t think we’ve seen an impact yet with respect to mobile data. Having said that, demand growth for mobile data has been pretty strong over the last 10 years, 20% to 30% growth a year. We see mobile data demand continue to grow. At any point in time in the last 5, 10, 15, 20, 30 years, there have been different drivers. More recent drivers have been things like all of us watching more live or video content on our phones.

I think going forward, when you look out over the next few years, a lot of demand will be driven by our AI agents working for us in the background. It won’t all be visually driven per se. Whether it’s apps on your phone that help you live your lives better, stay connected with people in different ways without you having to look at your phone, there’ll be other form factors, whether it’s glasses or what you wear. I think you’ll see more evolutions coming. When you think about the amount of data that’s being thrown around just between data centers with AI deployments and realize that none of that has really yet flowed into mobile data networks, I think there’s a fair bit that’s going to happen there that we haven’t even seen or experienced yet.

John Akin, Analyst, RBC: On the regulatory side, you have had former FCC commissioners on your board, and whether it’s things like shot clock, other kind of procedural issues that might affect colocation cycle time, approvals, permitting, auction authority, just kind of broad brush, how do you see the federal, and if there’s any states to kind of point out as well, but maybe primarily the federal level regulatory environment as it impacts towers?

Sunit Patel, Chief Financial Officer, Crown Castle: Yeah, I think you’ve seen more recent moves by Commissioner Carr in terms of what are the barriers or difficulties in getting things done on a local basis, permits, all of that. I think they’ve taken that up. You’re seeing transactions being approved, including the most recent DISH Network one, for example. You’ve seen the big, beautiful BILAC, which means that more spectrum is going to be sold over the next couple of years. The FCC clearly has the authority that was also underlined to do that. I think that things on the regulatory front are positive for us as an industry. Spectrum auctions are good, making it easier for us to do our business is positive, and deals are getting approved.

John Akin, Analyst, RBC: We’ll get to maybe private spectrum transfers shortly with SpaceX, but thinking about future auctions, what is it that you are sort of seeing as being potentially most impactful as it might pertain to more infrastructure being put on your sites?

Sunit Patel, Chief Financial Officer, Crown Castle: Our business is driven by, we charge based on how much space people occupy on a tower. When you look at the environment 10, 20 years ago to now, in general, there are several things that have been constants. One is carriers occupying more spectrum bands. When they do that, generally, that means they need more space on towers. Number two, the amount of data that is going through towers has continued to go up, and I think that will continue. When that happens, that’s a good thing for our business. When you look at the specific bands that the FCC has been asked to auction or sell over the next couple of years, some of them are in the mid-band spectrum. In general, they’ll be helpful. Are there areas where carriers can use the same radios to accommodate, you know, contiguous spectrum bands? Sure.

Again, when you step back and look at over a longer period of time, the constants I talked about continue to be present. They’re going to be occupying more bands, will need more data throughput, and generally, that should be good for us.

John Akin, Analyst, RBC: You did mention you charge based on the space occupied on your towers, and that kind of leads me to the topic of master lease agreements, specifically kind of the holistic style. You got pay by the drink, you know, the more you touch the tower, the more you pay, and then holistic, where it’s a little bit more kind of pre-arranged. Maybe you can set the stage in terms of your philosophy that has informed you under the existing MLAs that exist, and then maybe going forward, perhaps under new management, now, you know, as it’s soon to be pure play tower company, how your thoughts on MLAs might differ.

Sunit Patel, Chief Financial Officer, Crown Castle: Yeah, while I can’t get into the details with our agreements with any of our clients for confidentiality reasons, in general, we do like contracts where we have stable, predictable revenue profiles over a longer period of time. At the same time, allowing our clients to have flexibility, as you point out, they want to touch a tower, and they can want to touch a tower for different reasons. They want to swap out equipment, they want to upgrade equipment, they want to occupy more bands. We try to strike the right balance between those things.

John Akin, Analyst, RBC: Can you maybe drill down a little bit on just sort of lease expirations, whether it’s MLA driven or not? What are kind of the years going forward that you’ve talked about around kind of peak exposure to that topic? The reason I ask is just related to the AT&T, you know, EchoStar transaction, where they’ve talked about decommissioning sites, which, you know, involves not paying for backhaul, not paying for electricity. Can they also not pay tower rent?

Sunit Patel, Chief Financial Officer, Crown Castle: Let me make the general point first, and I’ll come to the specifics. The general point is we provide pretty detailed disclosures in our filings with respect to our contracts and, you know, what years they go. Not very specific, but generally, investors have a good sense of that. In terms of the DISH Network EchoStar situation, we do have a firm contract with them that goes through 2036 for 20,000 towers. We feel good about our contract. We’ll see how things play out. I can’t speak for them, but we do have a strong contract.

John Akin, Analyst, RBC: It was a five-year deal at the time of signing, more or less at the end of 2020, as I recall.

Sunit Patel, Chief Financial Officer, Crown Castle: As I said, our contract goes till 2036.

John Akin, Analyst, RBC: 2036, I’m sorry. Yeah, yeah, 15 years. Maybe quick words on capital allocation, buying back stock versus other types of priorities, dividends.

Sunit Patel, Chief Financial Officer, Crown Castle: Yeah. We have a few key points there. One is we want to be investment grade. We are selling our fiber and small cell business for $8.5 billion. We’ve said that we’re going to allocate $6 billion to debt paydown and the rest to share buybacks. I think we’re still, and the third thing we said is that from a dividend policy perspective, we expect to pay 75% to 80% of our AFFO out in dividends. As we grow the AFFO, we should be able to grow the dividend. Secondly, that also means that 20% to 25% of our AFFO gives us incremental flexibility to do other things, whether it’s to buy more shares back or make sure we are comfortably investment grade. It does give us flexibility there too.

John Akin, Analyst, RBC: Since you reported, and you were the first tower company to report, there’s been some kind of growing awareness of one of the carriers engaged in kind of high rent relocation. I’m just wondering, is that something that you think you would be exposed to, or are you protected by MLAs, or are you not necessarily the target for that sort of effort?

Sunit Patel, Chief Financial Officer, Crown Castle: Yeah, so different, you know, all of us as a sector have different types of agreements with our clients. I would say that we feel good about where we stand with respect to that. Obviously, I can’t comment on others, but we generally feel pretty good. Having said that, yeah, I mean, there’s always some of that. I think that we feel good about our position.

John Akin, Analyst, RBC: Maybe just the last couple of minutes talking about the second kind of big spectrum transaction involving SpaceX. We had a panel yesterday where there was kind of more of a technical discussion about the viability and use case for that sort of model. Any thoughts, whether it’s the economics of it or the business case?

Sunit Patel, Chief Financial Officer, Crown Castle: Yeah. Yeah, I mean, as you pointed out, I’ve been in the business a long time in these sectors. What I would say, there are several things to look at. One is the throughput of data. Now remember, it takes power to move every bit. When you think about the concept of bits per watt, keep that in mind. The amount of data that flows through fiber networks is many, many orders of magnitude larger than what flows on terrestrial mobile data networks. Similarly, the amount of data that is flowing and will continue to flow on mobile data networks will be several orders of magnitude higher than what you see going up in the air. I do think that satellite data is a valuable niche.

When you delve into the economics of that business and think about the number of satellites you have to put in, the other thing to remember is at any point in time, any satellite crossing the Earth, 80% of the time of the geography, there’s nobody living there. 70% of the planet is water. When you add in the Sahara Desert and any other extreme places, most of the time, the satellite, there’s no people it’s interacting with. When you look at, you know, any of these businesses need high occupancy rates or utilization rates to make money. The number of users, the number of satellites, and also you need line of sight with respect to satellite communications. Most of us, when we interact with our mobile devices, are indoors, like here, in the office, in the car, etc. You’re not walking out outside all the time.

It’s a valuable niche. There are a lot of new applications, IoT, remote areas, rural areas. I think it’s going to be a very good option, but I do think it will continue to be a niche option.

John Akin, Analyst, RBC: Audience questions? I think that does it. Thanks very much for your time.

Sunit Patel, Chief Financial Officer, Crown Castle: Thank you.

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