Crown Castle has just announced its purchase and 10 year lease of respectively 600 and 9,100 mobile towers from AT&T in the USA in a deal woth $4.85Bn. AT&T will lease back capacity on the sites for $1,900 per site per month and Crown will look to getting additional tenants on the site to make the deal profitable for itself. Crown Castle owns or operates by lease arrangement some 30,000 mobile sites.
Crown Castle owns around 1,600 towers in Australia. These have been acquired over the years since 2000 from Optus, Vodafone and Hutchison. The original mobile towers acquired by Crown were 700 from Optus in 2000 for $200M then 669 from Vodafone in 2001 for $130M. Another 140 were added from Vodafone in 2008 for around $40M.
The business model in Australia and the USA are similar. Crown buys the somewhat lazy tower assets and through deals it has with all mobile carriers and other radio operators leases space on the structures. The arrangement provides Crown a viable business while facilitating the sharing of towers and to an extent reduces the proliferation of cellular mobile structures.