Crown Castle Snaps Up DAS Company
Wireless tower company Crown Castle will buy NextG Networks, the nation’s largest provider of outdoor distributed antenna systems (DAS) for $1 billion, Crown Castle said Friday. NextG has more than 7,000 DAS nodes already in operation with another 1,500 under construction, with 80 percent of the nodes in the nation’s 10 largest metropolitan areas, Crown Castle said. The purchase is Crown Castle’s biggest since it acquired Global Signal in 2007.
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"Increasingly, we believe that small-cell architecture, such as DAS, will be an important complement to traditional macro tower installations,” said Ben Moreland, Crown Castle CEO. “We are very pleased with our anticipated acquisition of NextG, which furthers our ability to extend wireless infrastructure beyond those areas traditionally served by towers, thereby broadening our service offering in this growing market and positioning us to benefit from the continued demand for wireless data.”
Wells Fargo Securities saw the buy as a positive for Crown Castle. “Our immediate take is that this is a good strategic move … as small cell site demand increases as the spectrum crunch forces wireless carriers to find alternative solutions to manage the rapid growth in data traffic,” Wells Fargo said.
With the buy, Crown Castle becomes a dominant player in the DAS market with some 10,000 DAS nodes, said Evercore Partners. “We believe this deal is a natural fit for the company as we view DAS as the fastest growing opportunity in the U.S. tower space,” the firm said.