Crown Castle (NYSE:CCI) reported third-quarter financial results on Wednesday. The transcript from the company’s third-quarter earnings call has been provided below.
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Summary
Crown Castle reported third-quarter 2026 organic growth of 3.5%, excluding Sprint cancellations and DISH terminations, with a positive impact on site rental revenues.
The company increased its full-year 2026 guidance by $20 million for site rental revenues and $25 million for adjusted EBITDA due to cost efficiencies and increased ground lease buyout activities.
Strategic initiatives include a transformation program to enhance efficiency, a significant increase in ground lease buyouts, and a new customer agreement to extend lease terms and reduce churn risk.
The company is optimistic about future growth opportunities driven by increased mobile data demand, spectrum investments by wireless operators, and the potential for edge compute infrastructure deployment.
Management highlighted a long-term goal to expand margins by 200 basis points by 2030 and reaffirmed their commitment to maximizing shareholder value through their U.S. tower strategy.
Full Transcript
OPERATOR
Good day and welcome to the third quarter 2026 Crown Castle earnings conference call. All participants will be in listen-only mode. Should you need assistance, please signal a conference specialist by pressing the star key followed by zero. After today’s presentation, there will be an opportunity to ask questions. To ask a question, you may press star then one on your touchtone phone, and to withdraw your question, please press star then two. Please note that this event is being recorded.
I would now like to turn the conference over to Mr. Hamilton West, Vice President of Corporate Finance and Treasurer. Please go ahead.
Hamilton West (Vice President of Corporate Finance and Treasurer)
Thank you, Chuck, and good afternoon, everyone. Thank you for joining us today as we discuss our third quarter 2026 results. With me on the call this afternoon are Chris Hillabrant, Crown Castle’s President and Chief Executive Officer, and Sunit Patel, Crown Castle’s Chief Financial Officer. To aid the discussion, we have posted supplemental materials in the Investors section of our website at crowncastle.com that will be referenced throughout the call.
This conference call will contain forward-looking statements which are subject to certain risks, uncertainties and assumptions, and actual results may vary materially from those expected. Information about potential factors which could affect our results is available in the press release and the risk factors sections of the company’s SEC filings. Our statements are made as of today, October 21, 2026, and we assume no obligation to update any forward-looking statements.
In addition, today’s call includes discussions of certain non-GAAP financial measures. Tables reconciling these non-GAAP financial measures are available in the supplemental information package in the Investor section of the company’s website at crowncastle.com. With that, let me turn the call over to Chris.
Christian Hillabrant (President and Chief Executive Officer)
Thank you, Hamilton, and good afternoon, everyone. As I reflect on my first year at Crown Castle as CEO, I am pleased with the meaningful progress we have made to sharpen our strategic focus, simplify the business, and build a strong foundation for future growth. Over the past year we have taken several significant steps towards becoming a best-in-class U.S. tower operator in addition to completing the sale of our small cell and fiber businesses.
First, at the beginning of the year we took decisive actions to align our cost structure with the current business model while preserving our ability to support customers, deliver best-in-class efficiency, and enable future growth. These actions resulted in $65 million of annualized run-rate operating cost savings. Second, we launched an enterprise-wide transformation program to create a more efficient and scalable operating model that supports our long-term growth objectives.
Our transformation program spans the entire business and includes initiatives such as modernizing our systems, optimizing our facilities, spend, and reducing corporate labor costs. This year we launched a new project management system improving the application-to-air process and a new field services system enhancing our asset information and utilization data. We are also on track to exit our transition services agreement related to the previous sale of our fiber and small cell businesses, which we believe will allow us to further simplify our corporate functions.
Third, we continue to scale our ground lease buyout program while meeting our target returns. In 2026 we expect to purchase more than 400 ground leases, more than double the number completed in 2025. We believe acquiring land under our towers improves our margin and increases operational control of our assets, allowing us to deliver more value to the customer by meeting their needs more rapidly. Finally, we are also making progress strengthening our customer relationships and driving customer engagement.
We resolved a long-standing commercial issue in the quarter with one of our largest customers that advances our strategic relationship and positions us for future growth opportunities. We acquired a residual economic interest on a subset of our tower sites and extended the customer’s lease terms for those sites. We believe this agreement creates value for both parties by simplifying economics, increasing predictability, and limiting long-term churn risk.
We believe this progress positions Crown Castle to capitalize on an increasingly supportive long-term backdrop for wireless communications infrastructure. Mobile data demand, one of the clearest indicators of demand for our infrastructure, continues to grow at a healthy pace and is showing no signs of stopping with the emergence of AI-enabled applications, physical AI, and the acceleration of data-only wireless devices. We are also seeing continued investment in spectrum by our customers and others in the wireless industry.
Over the past year, carriers and other wireless operators have committed significant capital to acquire spectrum assets, including AT&T’s acquisition of 3.45 GHz and 600 MHz spectrum, Verizon’s acquisition of AWS-3 licenses, and SpaceX’s acquisition of AWS-4 H block and 800 MHz spectrum. These transactions demonstrate the commitments of the wireless industry to aggressively invest and to secure spectrum resources needed to support future terrestrial wireless network growth.
Notably, as part of its 800 MHz spectrum acquisition, SpaceX said it aims to become the first network operator to deploy both satellite and terrestrial spectrum. We believe SpaceX’s mobile network ambitions could provide an additional catalyst in two ways: first, to invest directly by leasing towers to build their previously announced terrestrial network, and second, as a catalyst for network operators to achieve investment in their mobile networks to enhance performance and coverage against new entrants in the wireless marketplace. Looking ahead, we expect the FCC to auction approximately 800 MHz of spectrum, consistent with Chairman Carr’s efforts to advance spectrum policy and maintain U.S. leadership in telecommunications.
This includes approximately 160 MHz of upper C-band spectrum expected to be auctioned by July 2027. Historically, new spectrum deployment has been an important driver of network investment, and we believe the industry spectrum pipeline remains supportive of long-term infrastructure demand. We continue to see momentum in edge compute infrastructure as demand for storage and compute continues to accelerate. While many large data center deployments face multi-year construction and power delivery delays, Crown Castle now has 100-plus edge sites deployed and several concurrent trials underway. While initial results appear promising, we continue to evaluate whether these edge solutions will scale. Crown Castle is positioned well to serve this demand in a capital-efficient manner through its nationwide network of tower sites, each with existing power and broadband connectivity and can provide select distributed move-in-ready locations.
Our talented and dedicated teammates continue to play a critical role in our progress transforming the business, and we are seeing rising levels of engagement with our clear and focused strategy. We are committed to investing in their continued development through additional training and individual development plans, and training in the cost-effective use of AI. In conclusion, over the past year we have taken decisive steps to simplify the business, strengthen our operating model, and build the right leadership team. This progress allowed us to increase our full-year 2026 guidance and positions us to capitalize on the sector tailwinds and opportunities. We believe our pure-play U.S. tower strategy, investment-grade balance sheet, and capital allocation framework positions Crown Castle to maximize long-term shareholder value.
With that, I’ll turn it over to Sunit to walk us through the details of the quarter.
Sunit Patel (Chief Financial Officer)
Thank you, Chris, and good afternoon, everyone. We continue to execute on our strategy towards becoming a best-in-class U.S. tower operator in the third quarter, positioning us to increase our full-year 2026 guidance. Starting on page 3, third quarter organic growth excluding the impact of Sprint cancellations and DISH terminations was 3.5% or $35 million. Third quarter organic growth increases to 3.8% if DISH revenues are excluded from prior year site rental billings. This growth was more than offset at site rental revenues by $5 million of Sprint cancellations, $61 million of DISH terminations, and a $17 million decrease in non-cash straight-line revenues and amortization of prepaid rent.
Third quarter services margin was $15 million, which we expect to increase in the fourth quarter. Turning to page 4, we are increasing our full-year 2026 outlook by $20 million for site rental revenues, $25 million for adjusted EBITDA, and $5 million for AFFO to reflect, first, a $20 million increase in straight-line revenues related to contractual term extensions as a result of the agreement Chris highlighted earlier and, second, a $5 million decrease in site rental cost of operations as we continue to drive efficiencies and increase our ground lease buyout activity.
Excluding the impacts of the transaction, full-year 2026 adjusted EBITDA and AFFO are each increasing $5 million. I would like to take a moment to further highlight our progress on driving cost savings since issuing our original full-year 2026 guidance in February. If you set aside the increases to our revenue and the decrease from our services contribution, we have increased full-year 2026 adjusted EBITDA by $20 million from run-rate cost savings by approximately 50 basis points as a percent of our site rental revenues.
On top of these improvements, we still expect to expand margins by more than 200 basis points by 2030 relative to 2026. Turning to page 5, full-year 2026 organic growth excluding the impact of Sprint cancellations and DISH terminations remains unchanged at $135 million, or 3.4% at the midpoint. Full-year 2026 organic growth increases to 3.6% at the midpoint if DISH revenues are excluded from prior year site rental billings. We continue to expect 2026 to mark the low point for organic growth. Our full-year 2026 organic growth outlook includes $60 to $70 million in core leasing activity, and based on our current view of the leasing pipeline, we expect to finish the year towards the bottom end of the range.
Now I’d like to provide additional detail on the customer agreement we completed in the third quarter. We paid $275 million to acquire a residual economic interest in a subset of towers originally acquired many years ago, extend the customer’s lease term for those sites, and limit long-term churn across this portion of our portfolio. By acquiring this residual economic interest, we expect to increase site rental billings by nearly $4 million in the fourth quarter, or $16 million on an annualized basis, and decrease amortization of prepaid rent by $2 million, or $8 million on an annualized basis.
We’re not changing our full-year 2026 guidance ranges for site rental billings, amortization of prepaid rent, and interest expense. As these fourth quarter impacts are captured within the existing ranges, on an annualized basis, we expect the impact of the transaction to be approximately $4 million accretive to AFFO. Excluding the impact of prepaid rent amortization, we expect the term extension will result in an additional $20 million of straight-line revenues in the fourth quarter.
Turning to the balance sheet. We ended the quarter with 97% fixed-rate debt with a weighted average maturity of 7 years and leverage at 6.5 times net debt to last quarter annualized adjusted EBITDA. Net debt to last quarter annualized adjusted EBITDA decreases to 6.3 times when including the impact from the incremental straight-line revenues related to the term extensions commencing in the fourth quarter. Lastly, we’re increasing our outlook for discretionary CapEx by $40 million to $240 million to reflect the higher volume of ground lease buyouts we expect to complete in 2026.
Discretionary CapEx, net of anticipated prepaid rent additions of $40 million at the midpoint, is expected to be $200 million at the midpoint. To wrap up, the actions we’ve taken this year to improve efficiency and strengthen the business support our increased 2026 full-year guidance. We also remain on track to deliver $2.1 billion of AFFO at the midpoint across the second half of 2026 and first half of 2027. We believe our investment-grade balance sheet, disciplined capital allocation framework, and focus on becoming a best-in-class U.S. tower operator positions us well to generate attractive long-term shareholder returns.
With that, operator, I’d like to open the line for questions.
OPERATOR
Thank you. We will now begin the question-and-answer session. To ask a question, you may press star then one on your touchtone phone. If you are using a speakerphone, please pick up your handset before pressing the keys. If at any time your question has been addressed and you would like to withdraw your question, please press star then two. And our first question for today will come from Rick Prentice with Raymond James. Please go ahead.
Rick Prentice (Analyst)
Yeah, thanks everybody. Good afternoon. A couple questions. First, as you know we always say follow the spectrum, really not the CapEx. And so one of the most interesting things, obviously you touched on it a little bit in the last couple of weeks, was [Grain/Crane?] selling spectrum to SpaceX, 800 MHz spectrum. So a couple questions in regards to that. We’ve heard some, to maybe all, of the towers out there that Dish rents might already include radios and antennas or some equipment for the 800 MHz frequency that SpaceX is buying.
Can you help us understand? Is that something you understand that might actually already be on your towers?
Christian Hillabrant (President and Chief Executive Officer)
Rick, the answer is there is some equipment that is on the sites. What specifically the radio types and bands are, I couldn’t tell you off the top of my head, but that is correct that the equipment is up there from when Dish abandoned it.
Rick Prentice (Analyst)
And obviously it’s also the old Nextel stuff. So our understanding is also it’s still in the handsets for a lot of handsets that are out there, so that’s also good to have. But are you, does it feel like to you that that is in the chipsets in a lot of the devices,
Christian Hillabrant (President and Chief Executive Officer)
The 800 MHz spectrum? Again, I couldn’t comment specifically on what the carriers have out there, but obviously I think more importantly, as you and I both know, 800 MHz does solve one of the critical challenges for an eventual SpaceX deployment, which is you need low band to get into buildings, you need low band to be able to provide breadth of coverage. And so it’s obviously a huge milestone in their acquisition of that spectrum.
Rick Prentice (Analyst)
Makes sense. A little confusing process obviously with the escrow set up at the FCC with EchoStar selling spectrum to AT&T. Can you update us as far as we’ve been hearing some chatter when we were in DC for the Wireless History Foundation dinner a couple weeks ago that the tower industry might be getting closer to figuring out who’s going to get how much out of the escrow? And maybe an update on what are you hearing from MLAs with satellite companies?
Any progress?
Christian Hillabrant (President and Chief Executive Officer)
Okay, well let’s handle the Dish one first. So here’s a quick update. The current proceedings in the bankruptcy court have been placed on pause while the parties attempt to negotiate assent in a court-ordered mediation. There’s no specific update to report on the progress of that yet. But as we communicated, I think on prior earnings calls, the fact that this has now moved into a bankruptcy process will likely result in an accelerated timeline comparative to traditional court proceedings.
So I think that’s a good news story. And the parties will remain in this mediation through early November. And then. Sorry, your second question was just around
Rick Prentice (Analyst)
Update on any MLA from satellite companies, whether it’s SpaceX, Amazon, or anyone else. Just how are we doing there?
Christian Hillabrant (President and Chief Executive Officer)
Yeah, so I don’t think I want to get into customer-specific detail, but you can assume that we’re talking to all parties.
Rick Prentice (Analyst)
Okay, last one for me. A lot of all these interrelated questions. The equipment that was abandoned by Dish on the towers, if somebody wanted to buy that for pennies on the dollar or take ownership of that, what’s the process? Would they come to you guys and different tower companies, do they need to go to the bankruptcy court? Do they go to Dish? Like if somebody wanted to say, hey, there’s some equipment up there that’s interesting to me. What’s that process look like?
Christian Hillabrant (President and Chief Executive Officer)
Yeah, I think it’s probably a question best left to the lawyers in terms of what that is. I mean, from our perspective, Dish’s equipment—they walked away from it. We’ve given them every opportunity to claim that equipment and take it off our towers, which they have elected not to do and have effectively abandoned it. But in terms of how that would work contractually, I think that would be something I’d have to refer out to the lawyers.
Rick Prentice (Analyst)
Yeah, I guess Shakespeare wasn’t right about, personally, what we do about the lawyers. But anyway, okay, thanks everybody.
Christian Hillabrant (President and Chief Executive Officer)
We love our lawyers. Rick, thank you for the questions.
OPERATOR
The next question will come from Brendan Lynch with Barclays. Please go ahead.
Brendan Lynch (Analyst)
Great. Thanks for taking my questions. Available Infrastructure is a company that has identified you as their vendor for deploying edge data centers. Can you elaborate on what you see the potential growth for this relationship?
Christian Hillabrant (President and Chief Executive Officer)
Yeah, let me start by saying we’re excited to partner with Available Infrastructure. As you know, they will be a nationwide network of edge neo-cloud data centers. And while edge data centers are not new to Crown Castle, we look at this as an exciting niche space and we look forward to seeing how it evolves over time more broadly. I guess an update on—we’ve had this trial now for a number of months. As you heard me announce earlier, we’ve now eclipsed 100 sites deployed. You know, part of what we’re looking at is to learn from these trials and understand both the demand profile from potential customers, but also just gaining an inventory of what we actually have and can actually market to our customers. And as we’ve gone through this process, we’ve identified, you know, we have something like 5,000 existing structures or shelters that are already existing, that are out at our sites today in various levels of condition, but able to take customers to move in right away.
We’ve been researching power, and I think you’ve heard us talk about before—the sweet spot for us is between, say, a 0.2 to a 0.5 megawatt installation, utilizing the existing power on sites for customers to be able to utilize it. Some customers have come back to us and have asked and inquired whether we would be able to bring additional power out to the sites. And just as a sampling, what we found across like 25 sites that we just recently completed—what we found out was across those 25 sites, there would be an opportunity to bring up to 100 megawatts in aggregate across those 25 sites.
And this is power that could be delivered in approximately 9 to 11 months with very limited capital required from Crown. So I think from an optionality perspective, it opens up the possibility of providing even greater service to our customers. But again, until we’ve finalized on how we can scale this profitably, I would still characterize this as a trial phase where we’re still learning a lot. And this update I’m with you now is indicative of what we’re learning along the way and how this might emerge as a business opportunity over time.
Brendan Lynch (Analyst)
Great. That’s helpful color. You’ve also suggested that you’ve hit an inflection point on organic growth. When we think about the cadence into 2027, can you break down where you anticipate an acceleration or deceleration between the components of core leasing, the escalator as Sprint churn fades, and normal-course churn?
Christian Hillabrant (President and Chief Executive Officer)
Yeah, let me just start by saying, you know, we reiterate that we believe 2026 is the low point for organic growth in our business and across the industry. The reasons why we believe that are the following. One is the MLA that we have in place that gives us visibility to that future contracted activity. We announced in this past quarter we resolved this long-standing customer issue, which both strengthens our relationship and clears a path for future growth opportunities with the customer.
The recent spectrum transactions, albeit somewhat delayed, in the AT&T acquisition of 600 MHz, Verizon’s acquisition of AWS-3, and now SpaceX with the 800 MHz—these are all positive catalysts for towers. And then longer term we talked about the opportunity of 6G and the fact that the FCC and administration has made it a priority to earmark 800 MHz of spectrum, and more importantly stating 6G is a battle to be won and is a kind of matter of life and death for the country to win that battle versus others, and starting that spectrum acceleration auction in July 2027.
And then the edge infrastructure ecosystem that is now starting to emerge, combined with the underlying factor that mobile data demand continues to grow and is even expected to double over the next five years, and the powering of AI inference that’s driving a much higher percentage of uplink traffic—all of these are activities of why we believe that 2026 is a low watermark for growth. But obviously that has to be borne out into ’27 and beyond. But these are positive tailwinds for the industry and for Crown as we look towards our future growth, without me speaking specifically towards our ’27 guidance, which I’m not prepared to share today.
Sunit Patel (Chief Financial Officer)
Yeah. And keep in mind now we’ve had some of the satellite players also declare their interest in a terrestrial network, so I think that’s a positive also.
Brendan Lynch (Analyst)
Great. Thank you very much for the color.
Christian Hillabrant (President and Chief Executive Officer)
Thank you, Brendan.
OPERATOR
The next question will come from Michael Funk with Bank of America. Please go ahead.
Michael Funk (Analyst)
Yeah, great, guys, thank you for the question this evening. So, first, going back to the 800 MHz and SpaceX comments, if they wanted to deploy that nationwide, can you give us an approximation for number of tower sites, minimum level of service with 800, and then your thoughts on the timing, the timing of a build of that scale, given any kind of labor constraints, equipment purchasing. Just maybe think about the framing for timing and contribution to Crown Castle if they do deploy the 800.
I have one more follow-up.
Christian Hillabrant (President and Chief Executive Officer)
Yeah, Michael, I think it’s a tough question to answer because it really depends on the strategy in which SpaceX decides to go to market. If part of their goal is to move as quickly as possible across a terrestrial network, that would lead them towards maximizing the number of colocations on existing towers and rooftops that exist today. And they’d have to accept the heights of what’s available in the RAD centers. If, on the other hand, they decided to go alone and to build thousands and millions and billions of microcells, it might take quite a bit longer based on the scale of not only identifying the land available, but also the time, cost and effort of bringing backhaul to every site and power to every site. So that’s a very good question. It really depends on what SpaceX decides to do in their network design.
I think what we would offer to them is the fact that we’ve got approximately 40,000 sites. In many cases, we do have prior installations that have been through the zoning and permitting process, so that it could help them, along with others in the industry, of getting to market faster and getting that 800 megahertz deployed.
Sunit Patel (Chief Financial Officer)
I mean, one indication, it took Dish like four years. And as Chris pointed out, some of that is already up. So if they wanted to, depending on their ambitions, you could do it on a much more compressed timeline, depending on how many sites they want to get to. But they can move quickly.
Michael Funk (Analyst)
So if they had 2029 timeline ballpark for wireless service, utilizing Dish sites is obviously easiest line of sight to get there versus doing the microcell strategy.
Christian Hillabrant (President and Chief Executive Officer)
This is the industry cheat code that exists, in that Dish just built this network. I know the people that built that network, many of which were former colleagues at T-Mobile. They’re very good, smart deployment people. They move very, very fast. Companies like Crown leaned in very aggressively to help them and staffed up in the service to actually help enable that. So that does represent a huge time-to-market advantage if they go down that route.
But in the end it’s going to depend on what route— is speed of essence, or is some other model more appropriate for them? I think you have to wait to hear from them. But I think on our side, we stand ready and available and, obviously, as one of the lead providers of our space to Dish, obviously have the scale to really help accelerate that.
Michael Funk (Analyst)
Great, thank you. One more. How are you thinking about the 600 MHz contributing to leasing activity and timing, whether that’s going to be a four or five year normal maintenance activity from AT&T or if you expect that will be new equipment, shorter duration for deployment?
Christian Hillabrant (President and Chief Executive Officer)
I think, if I’m being honest here, I think it’s first, the approval of 600 MHz of the transaction obviously took additional time as they went through the FCC approval process. And now I think the customer is very much in the throes of doing the design, engineering and selection of their OEM vendor, which would provide the equipment for them to put up. And so it’s probably been a little bit slower rollout than anticipated. That said, 600 MHz is the equivalent of beachfront property, is the way that I describe this.
It’s propagation that helps to drive coverage in urban and suburban areas. It extends coverage in the rural areas. The customer just paid 23 billion for the spectrum. It’s highly valuable. I would think that they would look to deploy this as quickly as possible, given the value in the overall spectrum portfolio of what they’ve just acquired. And with the handset manufacturers having already built these frequencies in for other customers, it’s something that they can actually put to good use very, very quickly.
Michael Funk (Analyst)
I appreciate the time. Thank you, guys.
OPERATOR
The next question will come from Nick Deldeo with MoffettNathanson. Please go ahead.
Nick Deldeo (Analyst)
Hey, thanks for taking my questions. First, Chris, you noted that you’re supporting over 100 edge sites. What would that number have been a quarter two or three ago, and what portion of that hundred are supporting GPU deployments versus other use cases?
Christian Hillabrant (President and Chief Executive Officer)
Yeah, let me start with the second part. I can’t tell you exactly what is in those. These have been build-outs that have continued to accelerate through the course of the year. Starting at the beginning of the year, I think we were effectively at zero or very few sites. So we’ve been able to build that number in that period of time. Again, the key learnings for us have been understanding what the requirements are of edge data customers that are different than our traditional tower customers and making sure that we’re able to provide them with that timely basis information to help them accelerate their deployment.
And so it’s been pretty much a steady build. I think it really peaked into third quarter. It’s built up steam. And again, the key for us is this: something that’s scalable so that we’re not just talking like 100 sites, but that we’re talking hundreds or even thousands of sites over time is when it really starts to make sense for us as a new line of business.
Sunit Patel (Chief Financial Officer)
Nick, it’s still small in the scheme of our overall revenues, but it’s a good sign. And I would say compared to the beginning of the year, we are talking to more players and I think just doing some more research on our sites and power availability and supply lines, as Chris was saying. It looks like, on certain subsets of sites, we can provide a bigger power footprint, which I think gets more in the sweet spot of what edge needs are. But again, it’s still early days and we’ll have more to talk about this in subsequent quarters.
Nick Deldeo (Analyst)
Okay. Okay, that’s good to hear. Thank you. And then maybe one. On the leasing outlook, you noted it’s going to come in at the low end of the expected range. Probably a little bit of a change from prior comments that leasing would be back-end loaded. Is that driven by leasing getting pushed into 2027 for some reason, or are you seeing a shift in the underlying trajectory or is something else going on? Any color there would be great.
Christian Hillabrant (President and Chief Executive Officer)
Just more broadly, I think we’re seeing interest from many different customers, including our traditional mobile network operator customers and these edge data center operators. In order to finish the year above the low end of the range that we guided to, we would have to see these opportunities materialize earlier than we currently anticipate. So it is— it’s more of a timing issue.
Sunit Patel (Chief Financial Officer)
Yeah, it’s more a shift, I would say. The excitement around what people want to do has probably built up, but it’s a timing shift as opposed to a trajectory shift.
Nick Deldeo (Analyst)
Okay, thank you both.
OPERATOR
The next question will come from Cameron McVeigh with Morgan Stanley. Please go ahead.
Cameron McVeigh (Analyst)
Hi. Thank you. So Elon yesterday said that he expects AI agents to drive orders of magnitude growth in bandwidth demand. And I’m curious, as we think of the extent that AI agents are driving higher uplink traffic, how much can the carriers accommodate with their existing equipment and potential software upgrades? And then to that point, have you had conversations with customers looking to upgrade equipment related to higher uplink traffic so far?
Christian Hillabrant (President and Chief Executive Officer)
Maybe put this in context and share at a recent analyst conference where we sat with the three CTOs of the operators and what they described was a very interesting and exciting future around AI and the impacts on the carrier networks. Predominantly that it would take the current network profile of where, say, 90% of the total mobile traffic data load is on the downlink and only 10% is on the uplink, that longer term that would move closer to a 50/50 between the downlink and the uplink, meaning that you have people in the field ingesting data through video, through voice, through text, whereby they would be ingesting that data and uploading it in order to gain real-time information.
And the implications of that are twofold. One of which is, to your point, there’s some re-architecting of the network, both in terms of capacity and then configuration of how to balance that traffic load up and down. Two is it starts to talk to latency, and does that become a bigger issue? And as you think about the edge of data compute, it’s something where, over time as those applications evolve, the need to have very fast response times lends itself toward the potential for future growth in the edge data centers.
So those are the two implications that we’ve heard directly from customers in terms of the difference in the customer profile. The broader context of the data growth— again, the latest data that I saw published was a doubling of total data payload over the next five years. This was the CAGR that was implied.
Sunit Patel (Chief Financial Officer)
Yeah, I think it’s going to be a big growth driver, as he was pointing out. I think it also means that fiber infrastructure into towers. I think you also talked about the implications for a need for a lot more edge compute and storage. So these are all things that should be good drivers for our business. And to your point, I don’t think it’s just a software upgrade. If you just have raw growth in bits and it takes power to move bits, it might need upgrade of equipment too over time.
OPERATOR
The next question will come from Michael Rollins with Citi. Please go ahead.
Michael Rollins (Analyst at Citi)
Thanks and good afternoon. Two different topics if I could. So first, going back to the customer dispute, can you provide just a little bit more background? You said it was long-standing. What was unique about that dispute versus the normal types of relationships that you have with your large carrier customers? And the payment that you made, is that related to the deferred purchase price associated with some of the carriers’ leasebacks, where there’s a certain amount of money that gets deferred into the future?
Or is there just— I know you mentioned some of the benefit you expect to leasing dollars, but any other context that you can provide there would be super helpful. And then just separately, back to the topic of Dish. Can you share how many of your 40,000 locations did Dish get to with their infrastructure before they hit the stop button? Thanks.
Christian Hillabrant (President and Chief Executive Officer)
Yeah, let me start with the second one first. I think the easy answer on the Dish was they had 12,000 plus installed sites with the ability to go up to 20,000 over time as they developed their network. And then in terms of, again, not so much a dispute, but just more of a long-standing customer issue. I would characterize it as just part of the normal back and forth that tower companies and their customers have over time, but it was something that, by resolving it, opens up the door for additional growth.
That was the key for us as a catalyst, getting this sorted.
Sunit Patel (Chief Financial Officer)
Yes. And a couple of additional things. You asked if we were purchasing futures— you know, this wasn’t that at all. This is more to do with the fact that this residual economic interest, as they were getting benefits from some of the revenues. So this just was a simplification. There was a win-win for both of us. I think for them it simplifies things for them on their side. For us, it was an accretive transaction for us, if you look at it on a multiple basis.
And also it came with a term extension and an agreement to limit churn on a longer-term basis. So I would say if you look at it in terms of from a balance sheet perspective, yeah, it’s 275 million, of which 158 million we put on Other intangible assets and then the other 118 in just other current activities. But that’s the value of the contractual term extension and limiting the churn. So that’s what it was. It didn’t really have anything to do with any purchase options or anything like that.
Yeah, I mean, so as you know, we said churn is 50 to 100 basis points. Fifty, probably call it, but it impacts churn. But, you know, as I said, it’s for a small subset of the towers, so not big enough to kind of impact our long-term guidance we’ve talked about with respect to churn, but it’s certainly beneficial. Thank you.
OPERATOR
The next question will come from Mike Ng with Goldman Sachs. Please go ahead.
Mike Ng (Analyst)
Hey, good afternoon. Thanks for the question. I just have two. First, I was just wondering if you could comment on some of the lower network services activity in the quarter and if you expect that to kind of return back to more of a normal cadence after this quarter.
Sunit Patel (Chief Financial Officer)
Yeah, I mean, look, if you look at our guidance for the service business this year, it’s 85 million. So if you look at what we reported in the third quarter, that implies we’ll see a nice pickup in the fourth quarter, a nice increase in the fourth quarter. So, yeah, it returns to more of a normal cadence. Probably not at the levels we might have guided to, but yeah, close enough in that vicinity, at least in the fourth quarter.
Mike Ng (Analyst)
Great, thanks. And I was just wondering if you could talk a little bit more about the operational efficiencies in the quarter and some of the kind of key drivers of the 200 bps of margin expansion over the next few years. Any change in terms of key things that could help you there?
Sunit Patel (Chief Financial Officer)
Yeah, I mean, so Chris talked about a couple of systems implementations we’ve done. We’ve got more of those coming up next year and the year after that. And then we also talked about exiting transition services agreement that will lead to further simplification in future periods. I think we’ve been consistent about saying our margin will improve to 200 plus basis points between year and 2030. But the fact is we made more progress on that this year and still sticking to that guidance, which I think should say on the margin we’re doing better than what we had indicated at the beginning of the year.
Christian Hillabrant (President and Chief Executive Officer)
Well, particularly the GLBL as a driver of our business. We identified at the start of the year that we had a gap to what our key competitors had in terms of owning land underneath our towers and embarked on a strategic program to accelerate those activities, which we effectively doubled, more than doubled year over year, and continues to be a large driver of the efficiency and cost savings that we’re investing in today.
Mike Ng (Analyst)
Great, thank you very much.
OPERATOR
The next question will come from Matt Niknam with Truist. Please go ahead.
Matt Niknam (Analyst at Truist)
Hey guys, thanks for taking the questions. I’ll keep it at two as well, but I’ll keep them simple. First, on services, I know you had maybe alluded to the expected downtick that we actually ended up seeing in the third quarter. Is there any indication of broader, softer leasing from carriers ahead of next year’s upper C-band auctions? And then secondly, on the edge data centers, can you speak to whether there’s a general type or size of customer you’re speaking to for these trials and if there are any sort of specific use cases they’re typically trying to solve for?
Christian Hillabrant (President and Chief Executive Officer)
Yeah, I mean in terms of the services, you heard me refer earlier to the fact that 600 MHz had been pushed out. And so this was something that when we led in the guide to would have an uptick in 4Q is now that the transaction has been completed and applications are starting to flow, that is the largest individual component from a services perspective. In terms of the edge data centers, you know, again, the traditional installation has been in a sub 1 megawatt, in a 0.2 to 0.5. It’s providing edge data compute at the cell site in the existing structures that we have, supporting use cases of kind of both a combination of capacity supply in a high-demand data center environment combined with folks that need the low latency that’s provided by the fact of our cell sites being as close to the edge as they are.
Those are the primary installation types that we’re seeing in that space.
Sunit Patel (Chief Financial Officer)
Yeah, and a couple of things. I mean, remember I think we’ve said that the service business has always been lumpy for us in any given quarter. We’ve talked about that in the past. From a long-term trend from the grant perspective, I think we talked about this earlier. We’ve seen a time shift, but the interest level in general continues to be pretty strong and active, and maybe helped by the change in the competitive environment a little.
OPERATOR
The next question will come from David Barden with New Street. Please go ahead.
David Barden (Analyst)
Hey guys, thanks so much for taking the questions. I appreciate it. I guess the first, if I could, would be the language around what SpaceX seems to be trying to do seems to be very prospective, like it’s going to maybe probably eventually someday build a network. You know, your services business has been very much about planning and, you know, permitting and those sorts of things. Usually when companies are planning on building something, they kind of come to you guys first and then they buy the spectrum.
They don’t buy the spectrum first and then figure out how to use it later. Could you guys weigh in on that a little bit, on how you really think what’s actually happening there? And then the second question, if I could please, would be regarding the upper C-band auction. We all know the auction is going to happen next year, but that the deployment is going to be delayed because of the potential interference with the FAA altimeter issues. So when do you think that that would actually begin? It’s probably not going to begin at the last minute in 2030, 2031. It’s probably going to begin sooner rather than later. So if you could give us a sense as to the conversations you’re having on that topic, it would be hugely helpful.
Thank you.
Christian Hillabrant (President and Chief Executive Officer)
Sure. Thanks for the question. So, let’s start with the SpaceX. And I think you raise a great point for those of us that have spent their careers designing, building, operating networks, of which I spent more than half my career doing for Verizon, predecessor, and T-Mobile, is you realize how complex these things are, how long it takes. And what I think Crown Castle brings to the table is a strong pedigree of experience in helping customers get on air quickly from the time an application comes in to the time that we give them an NTP to get up on air.
And so if SpaceX is serious, as it sounds like they are, in building a terrestrial network, I think we are a great partner for them in being able to help take a concept and turn it into reality of how to navigate through building a terrestrial network, which is, again, very, very different, obviously, than building a satellite network, as we’d be the first to admit. So that’s something that we believe we can add value to. And again, based on our portfolio and the fact of the partnership that we had with Dish initially, that we have the majority of our sites in top 100 markets where the vast majority of POPs are located, this is something that we can help to solve for, I think, in a significant way. And so we stand ready when and if that time comes.
Then more broadly, on your comments on the upper C-band, yeah, so there’s always been this issue where spectrum goes to market in auction. It takes the time that it’s to do an auction. Then the aftermath of that is the spectrum clearing before it can be put into use. What I think I’ve shared in the past is where there’s a will, there’s a way. And so if you think back to when the original C-band spectrum was being put into place and there were issues with potential adjacent channel interference with the altimeters, the industry found a way to work around that and to accelerate those activities.
And so I don’t know that you can put an exact date on when it is. There’s typically a deadline by which the FCC sets for having the spectrum clear, but oftentimes that’s not the actual date the spectrum is cleared and put into service. So I believe it’s one of these things where, you know, stay tuned to this space, but I would not anticipate that it takes that long. There is a desperate need to put additional spectrum to work based on the data growth that we’ve talked about before.
And therefore, again, where there’s a will, there’s a way to find a way to clear it and get it up on towers as quickly as possible.
David Barden (Analyst)
I really appreciate those comments, and I just want to be crystal clear that when you say that you stand ready to be a partner, the reality is that SpaceX really hasn’t reached out to do anything and that we’re just kind of waiting to find out what the plan is. Is that what you’re saying?
Christian Hillabrant (President and Chief Executive Officer)
I’ll just reiterate what I said earlier, which is, you know, we won’t discuss individual customer discussions and you can assume that we’re talking to all of them.
David Barden (Analyst)
Great. All right, man, I really appreciate it. Thank you.
OPERATOR
And the last question for the day will come from Batya Levi with UBS. Please go ahead.
Batya Levi (Analyst)
Great, thank you so much. Just wanted to get back to the discussion about the dispute you had with the customer. Is there any reserve that we need to factor in as a reversal as we forecast ahead? Maybe a cash component that you are expecting to receive, and is this an extension of an existing portfolio or addition of a new lease from the key customer? And any color in terms of how long that lease is and if it has a normal escalator would be helpful.
Sunit Patel (Chief Financial Officer)
It’s extension of an existing portfolio. There are no reserves or anything in the future. I think it’s sort of like what I described. We are paying 275 million to acquire a residual economic interest on the revenue side, and that’s what it is. But in addition to that, they extended the term of the contract for this particular set of towers, if you like, and agreed to limit churn on a longer-term basis. So I think those are the critical value components of this transaction.
Batya Levi (Analyst)
Is it a typical five-year extension?
Sunit Patel (Chief Financial Officer)
With a 3% escalator? Specific extension, but yeah.
Batya Levi (Analyst)
Okay, thank you.
Sunit Patel (Chief Financial Officer)
I mean you get some sense of it from the straight-line revenue treatment. But yeah, can’t give you more specifics than that. Sorry.
OPERATOR
And this will conclude our question and answer session as well as our conference call for today. Thank you for your participation. You may now disconnect.
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