Rental and Management
We conduct our site leasing business through our rental and management segment.
Our primary business is leasing antenna space on multi-tenant communications
sites to wireless service providers and radio and television broadcast companies.
Our portfolio consists of towers that we own and towers that we operate pursuant
to long-term lease arrangements, including approximately 20,000 tower sites
in the United States and over 2,800 in Mexico and Brazil. In addition to these
tower sites, we also offer access to over 10,000 rooftop and tower sites in
the United States that we manage for third parties. Through our rental and management
segment, we also operate in-building distributed antenna systems in malls and
casino/hotel resorts.
Wireless Communications Towers. We are a leading owner and operator of wireless
communications towers in the United States, Mexico and Brazil, based on number
of towers and revenue. Our network in the United States includes approximately
19,200 wireless communications towers and spans 49 states and the District of
Columbia. In addition, 87% of our U.S. network provides coverage in the top
100 markets or core areas such as high traffic interstate corridors. Our network
in Mexico includes over 2,000 wireless communications towers in highly populated
areas, including Mexico City, Monterrey, Guadalajara and Acapulco. Our network
in Brazil consists of over 600 wireless communications towers, which are concentrated
in southern Brazil in major metropolitan areas, including Sao Paulo, Rio de
Janeiro, Brasilia and Curitiba.
Annual rental payments vary considerably depending upon:
• tower location;
• number and weight of antennas on the tower and the size of the transmission
lines;
• ground space necessary to store customer’s electronic and other
equipment related to the antennas;
• existing tower capacity;
• type of tower structure (e.g., stealth tower);
• placement of the customer’s antennas on the tower; and
• type and amount of frequency transmitted by the customer.
Broadcast Communications Towers. We are one of the largest independent owners
and operators of broadcast towers in the United States and Mexico. We own approximately
200 broadcast towers in the United States and have exclusive rights to approximately
200 in Mexico. Broadcast towers generally are taller and structurally more complex
than wireless communications towers, require unique engineering skills and are
more costly to build. We lease antenna space on our broadcast towers primarily
to radio and television broadcast companies. In leasing antenna space, we generally
receive monthly fees from customers, with initial lease periods ranging from
ten-to-twenty years.
In-Building Neutral Host Distributed Antenna Systems. We are a leading provider
in the United States of in-building neutral host distributed antenna systems,
with over 125 in-building systems in operation in retail shopping malls and
casino/hotel resorts. We obtain rights to install and operate in-building systems
by entering into leases with property owners, and we grant rights to wireless
service providers to attach their equipment to our in-building system for a
fee under licenses that typically have an initial non-cancelable term of at
least ten years.
Network Development Services
We offer tower-related services through our network development services segment.
We historically offered extensive tower-related services to support our site
leasing business. During the last several years, as we continued to focus our
operations on our rental and management segment, we sold services businesses
that did not provide incremental value to our site leasing business. With the
sale of our tower construction services unit in November 2004, we substantially
completed our strategic transition to a focused site leasing company. Our network
development services segment continues to provide site acquisition, zoning and
permitting services and structural analysis services that support our site leasing
operations and the addition of new tenants and equipment on our sites.
Site Acquisition, Zoning and Permitting Services. We engage in site acquisition
services for our own account in connection with our tower development projects,
as well as for our customers. We typically work with our customers’ engineers
to determine the geographic areas where the customer needs to construct a new
tower site to address its coverage objectives. Once a new site is identified,
we acquire the rights to the land or structure on which the site will be constructed,
and we manage the permitting process to ensure all necessary approvals are obtained
to construct and operate the communications site under applicable law.