Wireless REITs’ Towering Prospects

The leading tower REITs generally have multiple tenants per tower. (Photo courtesy of Crown Castle International)

HOUSTON—During Crown Castle International’s first-quarter conference call Wednesday, CEO Ben Moreland cited Cisco data showing that US mobile data consumption grew 56% last year compared to 2014. “The year-over-year growth alone represents a staggering amount of data consumption,” said Moreland. “It is almost equivalent to all the mobile data that crossed the cellular networks in 2013.”

In “REITs That Tower Above the Competition,” a blog posting on Bloomberg Business earlier this week, reporter Rani Molla provided more growth metrics on the growth in mobile demand and capacity. “As people use more devices more frequently to do more tasks (read: watch cat videos), global mobile data traffic is expected to grow at an average rate of 53% annually from 2015 to 2020, according to forecasts from networking equipment company Cisco,” she wrote. “That means monthly data traffic per active smartphone in North America in 2021 will be 22 GB a month—bigger than the entirety of most current family data plans.”