Thank you guys all for joining this session. My name is Dave Barden. I head up the Telecommunications and Comm Infrastructure Research Group for Bank of America in the U.S. and Canada. We're really pleased to have with us today Rod Smith, the Chief Financial Officer from American Tower Tower , joined by Alex Head from the IR group here. Thank you guys for joining us at our 2023 Real Estate Conference.
Yeah, you're welcome. Happy to be here. Thanks for inviting us, David, and thanks everyone for coming and joining us this morning.
So as the very first REIT in the US and as the official flag bearer at the conference, I have to ask you the three conference questions that everyone's been hearing answers to from all our management teams. And the first is on the Fed. Do you believe the Fed is done hiking? And yes or no, and do you think the Fed will cut rates in 2024, yes or no?
Yeah, it's a great question, and I not that I want to avoid your first question, but I hate to speculate what the Fed is gonna do. It's really a no-win situation. Certainly, the sentiment at the moment is that they would hold rates where they are, and I think that's probably likely, at least this go around. What that means longer term, we'll just have to let the economic indicators kind of figure out where they're gonna go and what the Fed will do. But they've done an awful lot of work. They've raised rates quite a bit, and I'm certainly hopeful that that they've done enough. That would be good. With that said, you know, we're not overly speculating on in terms of where rates go.
We kinda see this environment as an environment with uncertainty around rates, and we wanna make sure we have a strong, kind of defensive balance sheet in light of that. So we are focused on delevering. We're focused on reducing exposure to floating rate debt. That's been important to us.
[audio distortion]
Sure. Oh, let's see. Is that any better? No? I don't know if is the mic even on? Doesn't feel like it is. How about I just speak up louder? Doesn't feel like the mic is on. So that's kind of the way, that's kind of the way we think about rates. You know, we wanna just be, be prepared, in this environment where rates have gone up and, and uncertainty around rates continue.
So I noticed that you guys, just on my way over here, launched a bond offering today. Maybe talk a little bit about that in the context of your thoughts on fixed versus floating, and it looks like you're looking for a 10-year plus 190. That would put you kind of in the 6% type of funding range. How do you feel that fits into your kind of financial plan?
Yeah. So we are in the market today, where we're, you know, looking for a benchmark size, splits between five and 10. We'll see where the pricing gets through during the day, so we'll let that kinda unfold. And what we would do with the proceeds is reduce floating rate debt exposure. So we started the year with about $7.5 billion of floating rate debt. That was about 20% of our debt structure that was exposed to floating rate debt. In the first half of the year, we've been able to reduce that down to about $5 billion or about 15% of our overall debt structure. And the market activity that we're in today will help further reduce that. So,
You're gonna take out the variable with this?
We'll end up taking out the variable and with this, that will likely put us, you know, somewhere lower than 15% exposure to floating rate debt. That's, that's a good thing. The floating rate debt today, the cost of that is a little over 6%. So, there's a good chance that this transaction today will be accretive to the overall interest rates, mildly, but accretive, but it also takes away some uncertainty around rate and variable interest charges going forward, which is a good thing for us.
Does that move towards fixed imply that you don't expect lower rates in 2024 anytime soon?
No, not necessarily. It really just highlights the fact that we see an environment where rates are uncertain. And bringing certainty in an uncertain environment, we think is a good thing.
I think that this second big real estate question probably isn't exactly applicable to the tower space, because I think you guys talked about the bid- ask dynamic in the industry in general.
Yeah.
But I think that there's an interest level among real estate investors generally about activity levels. Do you think that there are more or fewer or the same amount of deals likely to kind of unfold in the second half of 2023 into 2024?
From an M&A perspective, globally perspective?
M&A perspective globally, yeah.
Yeah. You know, it's an interesting question. Again, I'd hate to speculate on what deals might come up. Certainly, the deal flow is lower than it used to be, than it has been in the last several. I guess if you go back a year ago and you look at the preceding five years, there were a lot of deals being done globally. That has, that has slowed down. I think we're gonna continue to be in a environment where M&A is a little bit slower. There still is a spread between the bid and the ask. There certainly is a differential between public equity valuations and private company asks, at least at the moment.
So I think there's a little bit more kind of time that has to elapse before, you know, deals begin to really flow like they, like they used to. With all that said, when we look around the globe, there are a number of places and a number of potential assets that we think will come up, you know, over the next, let's call it five years, right? Maybe not in the next year and a half, two years, but when you look out over the longer term, there's opportunities for inorganic growth that will, that will come up. When we look at our portfolio globally, we like right where it sits. We don't feel the need to make changes or, or buy anything material. We're likely in the countries that we wanna be in, whether that's developed or emerging markets.
I think we're there, and now it's about building scale within the select markets where we're driving value creation. So we would be disciplined. We'll continue to be disciplined. But out over the longer term, if deals come in that are in the right geography, with the right counterparty, with the right growth attributes, and we can strike the right terms and conditions with the sellers, we wanna be prepared to execute on that. I don't see that happening for us, certainly not this year, and probably not in the first half of next year. We will continue to be focused on delevering probably through that period.
On the flip side of that is divestitures. Obviously, you've been pretty public about your desire to kind of transact a majority stake out of India.
Yeah.
Is there some kind of update on the timetable for that? Is that a 2023 event?
No real update from what we talked about in our last public call. We are in the later stages of a process. We have options, discussions continue with very credible, well-known global investors that we're talking through. And our expectation is that if we come to agreement, it'll probably happen in the second half of this year. There would also be an approval process through the government to transfer equity and those kind of things. So the closing timeframe potentially could happen this year, potentially could be early next year. But-
Mm-hmm.
you know, I would say, look, look for, you know, if negotiations continue to go well, look for some announcement second half of this year.
So let me ask, just on that topic, before we get to the third big question in real estate.
Yeah.
A couple questions on that. One, is that there's been, to your point about the difference between the bids and the asks, reports out of India are that the valuation for that, for a 50% stake in that business, is gonna be transacting in the $1 billion-$2 billion neighborhood. You know, you guys have kind of talked more about a $4 billion valuation. Who's right?
Yeah, it's an interesting way to frame up the question. Certainly, we, you know, we have a carrying cost in India of about $2.5 billion or so. I think we've invested a little bit more than that into the market. India is a very interesting market. There are public comps there, so you can kind of look and see what the public trading values are, the publicly traded companies. That would give you an indication. But certainly, when you look at that public valuation, it's mid-single digits. You know, that's kind of what we see in terms of the public company over there trading. And the value will be the value. The value of that business is really based on future forward-looking growth prospects.
Everyone may have their own view. So, we certainly have a view, and we'll kind of work through that. That'll be part of the negotiation with the parties that we're talking to. But when we look at the market, you know, it's really, we're not making this decision based on past experiences. We're making decisions based on what we expect the outcomes to be going forward.
Mm-hmm.
We will end up making what we believe is the best decision for our shareholders going, value creation. And if selling a majority stake of India and reallocating that capital to a different use, and in this environment it would be to pay down debt, build debt capacity potentially for some future use, more creative, you know, higher return use down the line, then we will be doing that. We won't on what and what we get now, it's all about going forward, what are the growth prospects? What are the quality of the earnings? How those earnings in India, what are the alternative uses of cash? That's what we're gonna be looking at.
So I've gotten this question from real estate investors that are looking maybe at American Tower at early stages. Let me ask you this question: If for the sake of argument, you're selling India at a mid-single digits multiple-
Yep.
Is there any concern on your part that if people started extrapolating, "Oh, let's put a Telesites up on Mexico. Let's put an INWIT multiple on Europe. Let's put an IHS multiple on Africa," is there any concern that when you add those all up, what appears to happen at the American Tower Tower consolidated level is that you actually get a rare holding company premium for holding these international assets? Is there some part of you that wonders if maybe expressing this value in India might be a detriment to the stock price and how people look at it and value it?
No, there, there's not. I mean, when I look at our business globally, you know, I think there should be a premium for American Tower management of these assets and figuring out how to deploy capital in these emerging markets, as well as balancing that with the capital we deploy in domestic markets. I think India is a unique place for a lot of different reasons, which, you know, I won't go into, to all the detail. But what we see, potentially impacting long-term kind of future growth in India is unique to India-
Mm-hmm
and not in other markets. So you can have more macro global cycles that you know cause ups and downs in public equities. I think you're seeing that even in the public equities for s in the U.S. You know, you see that globally as well. But you know, I think American Tower has a long-standing history and tradition to make, of making good decisions internationally. And I do think that the India decision that we will ultimately make will reflect well on us in terms of our ability to understand you know what is happening in India, where that market's going, and having the courage to make decisions around redeploying that capital somewhere else. I think that's a good thing for investors.
You know, we also recycled some capital out of a small fiber business in Mexico. You know-
Can I ask a question there? When you finance foreign s, do you use local currency, or do you use American Tower currency to build those s that are on?
Yeah, we use-
Let me repeat the question-
Yeah
... which was, from the audience, which was: When you are investing in international markets, you use local currency to finance it?
... Yeah, we do have some local currency, not in every market. India is a market we do have some local currency borrowings. We've had it over time. We've had as much as a few hundred million dollars of local currency debt in India, that we've used to fund build-to-suits and investments in India. We are in 25 different markets, but we have local currency borrowing just in a handful of markets where it makes sense. Our balance sheet has kind of shifted towards more exposure to European Europe debt, you know, which we find is helpful now that we have a larger presence in Europe. But the primary way to think about the way we fund our businesses is we raise U.S. dollars, we export those into international markets to do acquisitions. We put intercompany debt on it.
That's a way to get dollars out on a consistent basis from local countries. You know, they pay back the intercompany interest, and it helps balance cash taxes and getting, you know, cash and kind of repaying some of that initial investment.
Just on that, maybe to follow up on that question real quick. Obviously, one of the big movements, this past quarter was the Naira,
Yeah.
Revalued pretty substantially in Nigeria.
Yeah.
You were actually kind of lucky that the Real and the Peso in Mexico, Brazil, kind of offset that effect. I think that that speaks a little bit to the diversity of the currency, and somehow when some are up and some are down, it all kind of balances out.
Yeah.
But is there anything about that experience in Nigeria that makes you think about hedging in a more serious way or at the margin?
No, it doesn't really change our approach to hedging. A couple of things I would say. First off, with all the deals that we do, around the globe, we underwrite those deals with an expectation of foreign currency impacts and foreign currency devaluation, let's say, over time. And we have that built into the long-term models. So the one thing we know about foreign currency is it's very difficult to predict on a quarterly basis and even an annual basis, but you have a much better chance when you look out over a long period of time, 10 years, 20 years.
So we're long-term investors, and we underwrite our international deals with, with the expected foreign currency devaluation included, which is, which is the way that it usually is underwritten, the devaluation in currency across Latin America, across Africa, across many of the emerging markets in India. They naturally have and are expected to see currency devaluation. That makes its way into our long-term models, and then our returns assume that level of devaluation, and we feel pretty good that over a long period of time, you're probably gonna be in and around that level of devaluation. The way we get to that expected devaluation is looking at the long-term curve for inflation expectations in those local markets, up against the inflation expectations in the U.S., and the differential translates into foreign currency devaluation or appreciation, depending on how it would be.
And now that we're in Europe, we see some of that. So that's so we do have that underwritten in the, in the investments that we, that we make. Much of the cash flow that we have, that we generate in the, in the businesses, comes through at very high margins. A lot of the expenses in the emerging markets, like, power and fuel, get passed through the carrier, so we don't take the risk of, of power and fuel prices going up and, and even the, the foreign currency. There we have protection around the globe, for high inflation in local markets, 'cause we have generally uncapped, escalators that are linked directly to inflation. So we're seeing the benefits of that across Latin America. We see the benefits of that in Africa, in parts of Europe.
In India, India is a place where we have 2% escalators. That's one of the things that... Of course, that goes into the underwriting going forward with, with in India. And it's—I guess I would put it in the category of lessons learned, that two-fold. One is, you know, having a fixed escalator, that is expected to be well below the inflation of that country, is not, not a great long-term, component of a deal for us. Number two is, in certain markets, that could be very difficult to change over time. We, you know, we thought we could change that over time, maybe with new, new contracts, new customers. And what we are realizing is it's very difficult to change and, quite frankly, probably unlikely to change.
And that's going into our thinking around, do we stay in India as a full owner, or do we, you know, sell a majority stake? So that certainly is a lesson learned from that perspective. When it comes to hedging, you know, we do have some local currency borrowings. We have local currency borrowings in the euro now. The euro has a different relationship with African countries than the U.S., so you know, you do get some differences there. We are seeing continued headwinds from FX in Africa. We're seeing substantial tailwinds in Latin America and in Europe right now. So that portfolio effect, having exposure to multiple currencies, you know, helps mitigate the ups and downs that you might see. But we also do feel good about the way we underwrote these assets over the long term.
I do want to get to actually your real business-
Yeah.
But I have a third question. Which is, are you using AI to help run your business today, and do you expect to allocate more resources to AI in the near future?
Yeah, it's a great question. I mean, we are exploring AI just like everyone is exploring AR, AI. Our you know, our IT group as well as our innovation group are doing some work on it. We've talked to some companies that have AI tools and technology. We do think AI and the predictive nature, the learnable nature of that, it is potentially helpful to go through unstructured data and create patterns and then make predictions on that. We're seeing that that could actually be helpful to a business of our size, geographically spread with the amount of data that we have access to within our own business. So, yes, we're exploring that. It's not gonna be a big investment, so you know, you won't see anything from that perspective.
I would say we're at the—of course, we're at the very beginning of that, so more to come later. But I do think it's shaping up to be a nice addition, you know, to analytical research, to really understanding and using data. We certainly have data warehouses and data lakes. We get all the data from our businesses around the globe into a central repository. We have the ability to extract and analyze, and make decisions, and we use that a lot. Like, we've learned a lot. And based on data, and even based on some of the things that we've experienced in India, it's not as though we're just learning our lessons today. We've been learning for the last 10 years about India.
Some things are shifting in India that make us maybe think now is the right time to sell a majority stake. But we took those lessons learned, and we applied them to new underwriting cases over the last several years. And I would highlight, not to get too specific, but you know, there are many portfolios in Asia that were available that we looked at. And we saw some similarities to what we have experienced in India, and we didn't, you know, execute on any of those deals because we had a different view of the outcomes based on our lessons learned in India.
Things like, you know, having low to no escalators in an environment where you have 5%-6% inflation, it's not a great place to be. And again, changing those terms once you're in the market is very difficult.
You didn't just type that into ChatGPT and get the answer?
No.
Okay.
No, we didn't.
So along these lines, I mean, American Tower just to touch on this real quick. American Tower is in the kind of unique position of owning a data center. We're running concurrently our first-ever 2023 AI conference.
Yeah.
We've got data center companies presenting there. We were lucky enough to talk to Juan Font, who runs your data center business, formerly known as CoreSite.
Yeah.
Still known as CoreSite-
Yeah.
inside American Tower . It's a small piece of your total business, but, is it fair to say that this business is outperforming kind of what your expectations were when you acquired it?
Yeah, I think, I think that is fair to say. You know, it's just the, the raw numbers suggest that it is outperforming. We underwrote it with a roughly a 6%-8% economic growth rate, and, and we've been at the high end, if not outside of that range, you know, since we bought it. We experienced our, a record-setting level of new business being signed in 2022. We're on pace to have a, a level of new business signed in 2023 that is, getting close to the record that we set in 2022. The other thing I would say about that is the, the cycle of actually signing up new business, then actually deploying it and getting to the place where you're collecting revenue on it, can take 18 months to two years.
So much of that record-setting new business, you won't see in our growth rates till the late stages of 2024 and into 2025.
Mm.
So not only are we outperforming now with upper single-digit, I think we had double-digit, you know, interconnection growth in the last quarter. We've been up in the, you know, upper single-digit revenue growth. But with the record level of new business we've experienced in 2022, the high rates that we're experiencing in 2023, we've got a, an order book and a pipeline that is, you know, larger than it's ever been. And that speaks really well to a continuation of strong performance and even higher potential growth rates when you get to late 2024 and into 2025, when we're actually delivering on all the new business that we signed up in 2022 and 2023. And it's kind of across the board.
I mean, we're seeing high levels of, you know, economic growth in terms of being up at the higher end of the 6.8% or, or above that. We're seeing high levels of interconnection growth, again, up in the single digits. We're seeing churn at the lower end, of the curve. We're able to increase pricing in this environment, so we've been doing that a few times. The other thing that a lot of people ask about on the, the data center side is power pricing going up and power availability, and we're in really good shape on both of those. Power, for us, the simple way to think about it on our data center side is we, we can pass that through to the, to the customers.
Some of our assets are in regulated areas where pricing can't change, but when it does, our contracts allow us to pass it through to the customers. Whether they're on a variable contract or a fixed contract, which means they pay us a fixed fee, or they pay us for what they use, either way, if pricing goes up, we can readjust the prices at any point and pass that back through. So we're protected from power prices in those increases. And in the markets that we're in, where, you know, based on the activity levels that we're seeing, we're pre-purchasing power and making sure that we have power available to us a year down the line, two years down the line. We're looking now to make sure we have land available.
You know, we bought a couple of parcels of land recently that will be used to build additional facilities in and around the campuses we already own, that'll connect into the cloud on-ramps we already have and benefit from the power that's already there. So for us, a lot of the planning is over the longer term, the medium term, the next couple of years, is making sure we have the capacity available to build out to meet the demand, and we're in good shape, and we work on that a lot. Then to make sure we have the power available to meet that demand going forward for the next several years as well.
And with that said, we've signed up some new power agreements in certain parts of the country where we know we need more power, and the utility now is building out those substations and has committed to delivering that power to us in 2024 or 2025, you know, when we contracted it, when we need it. So we're in good shape from that perspective. But that business is performing exceptionally well, and it is a testament to the high-quality nature of that business. It's not your traditional data center business. It's centered around multiple cloud on-ramps in each campus. It's centered around hundreds, more than 450 networks being present within these campuses, and that attracts the highest quality enterprise customers, enterprise retail customers, that enjoy a high level of interconnection within that.
And when you have that, when those enterprise customers are there to access networks, to access multiple clouds and interact with one another, it's quite frankly more difficult for them to unplug and move somewhere else. That's what keeps the growth rates up, the churn down; it gives us the ability to increase prices on our cash mark-to-market. In some data center businesses, that's a negative. When a lease for space comes up to renew, you give them the same space for less money. That's kinda not surprising. In our environment, it's always a 3%-4% increase, and even now we're seeing it at the upper end and outside of that as well. So the quality of the asset is really good, the performance is really good, so we're very pleased with it.
Sounds exciting.
Yeah. Yeah, and it may lead to being able to connect assets into data centers, through the edge at some point, someday.
So, you know, you mentioned that stocks can go through these macro cycles, and stocks have struggled this year. It's been noticed by everybody. You know, I have a theory. I think there are three reasons why that is. Number one, the world has decided that there's not gonna be a recession, so we don't need to be in defensive stocks anymore.
Yeah.
Number two is rates are up, and they look in a no recession environment, that they're gonna be higher for longer. That means refinancings are more expensive than, you know, the old school, you know, days. That's having a-
Mm-hmm
... an effect on the FFO outlook. The third is that there's a big slowdown. We all knew it was coming-
Mm-hmm.
but it, you know, in the words of one of your peers, "It was more abrupt slowdown than maybe a lot of people expected." And there's not really an obvious catalyst for a re-acceleration in carrier spend, which could kind of create surprising upside. American Tower stands out in that third element of performance, and has outperformed peers, because your domestic growth outlook is so much better.
Mm-hmm.
and the international diversity that you have actually is a strength. and so I guess the first piece of that, can you talk about how is it that you can look out and say, "I've got 90% visibility on 5% domestic top line growth?" Was that an accident, or are you that good?
Yeah. No, it wasn't an accident. And to be modest here, I would say that it's just something that we've been building into our business over a long period of time. So the reason we have such high level of visibility to our growth rates for this year, and then our confidence in being able to provide a long-term guide for organic tenant billings growth in the U.S., that, on average, 5% from now to 2027, is because of the nature of the agreements that we have in the U.S. And the way that they work, and just kind of a simple explanation is, we call them comprehensive agreements or holistic agreements.
What it is is an arrangement between us and a carrier, where the carrier basically tells us what activity level they wanna perform over a multiyear period. We price that up, and then that becomes kind of their revenue step up, so the use right fee that goes in the agreement. And for that use right, we give them the rights that they were looking for, right? So we're not giving them discounts, we're not giving them any other, you know, economic benefits. We're basically just. They're committing to use our sites in a certain way and to pay for it over a period. It takes the variability out of the situation. The real benefit is that it gives them visibility into their expense line based on the work that they expect to do.
That way, in that time period, you're not changing pricing tables and that sort of thing. It's kind of baked in for a multiyear period, which is good for them. But the real benefit is that it administratively makes it much easier. So instead of having to file a site license and negotiate a price or, even other terms and conditions, and wondering how long it's gonna take to get that approved and kind of working through, you can remove, you know, literally months out of the, out of the cycle, and you remove a lot of unpredictability in that cycle from, from the carrier's point of view. So they now—we've got a, a framework where they already know what they're paying.
Those payments just continue to come and they escalate at certain time periods, kind of over a multiyear period, and they have certain rights. They just file SLAs and turn them in, and then they can quickly get their equipment on the site. So it takes out any kind of risk in terms of their network deployment, and they're paying what they expect to pay for the activity level that they're providing. We're now in a situation where we have that type of a structure with most of the carriers in the U.S. So we have high level of visibility into an average 5% organic tenant billings growth from now to 2027. And it's sort of decoupled from the actual level of activity that the carriers do from quarter to quarter or year to year.
And the other thing I would say, the carriers will pay for that activity level they committed to, whether they use it or not. And they're really good about using it. So they, they will use the rights that we've given them. They will pay for those rights as well, and that's what underwrites the 5%. So from that perspective, we're fairly well insulated from a temporary pullback in capital investments from the carriers from now to 2027. When I look ahead later in that period and beyond 2027, there's gonna be a need for continued carrier investment in the networks, probably in the range of $35 billion a year, to keep their 5G networks up and running.
And there will be use cases coming down the pipe that'll spur demand for 5G-type speeds and reduction in latency and capacities, and those sorts of things. That is something that every time you change the cycle of technology, going from 2G to 3G, 3G to 4G was huge, and then now 4G to 5G, people wonder, why do you need 4G? They know when people were still on 3G networks, why they needed 4G. Once the iPhone came in and applications came in, they realized why they need 4G, and the spending, you know, was there for a long time from the carriers. Same thing is gonna happen with 5G.
The technology of the 5G, the lower latency, the higher speeds, the broader capacity, the different type of spectrum that's used, that's gonna drive use cases, increases in mobile data consumption, and because of the nature of the propagation of the mid-band spectrum, it's gonna drive a need for more investment in the networks to make sure that their networks give you that ubiquitous true 5G experience. So we do think that the slowdown in spending you're seeing today is certainly temporary. Even now, what you see is a level of spending that's on par or even ahead of where it was in 4G. It's just not where it was last year. And our expectation was never that the carrier spending was gonna stay at north of $40 billion a year.
It probably pulls back in somewhere between 30 and 35, and moderates over the longer term in this 5G cycle at around $35 billion a year. That's kinda what, what we see. So we are, we are, protected from volume slowdowns between now and 2027. By the time it gets to 2027, there's gonna be needs for, long-term capital investments and pretty consistent capital investments.
When you, not you, when Verizon or anybody goes from 2, 3 to 4 to 5, those are costs too, don't they? They pay 100% of the upgrade.
Yeah, that's the right way to think about it. It's really them upgrading their network. They're upgrading their antennas, their cables and the lines, their software in the spectrum that they use.
It doesn't affect you monetarily.
It doesn't affect us monetarily. I mean, there could be some redevelopment. It's not technology specific, and in the U.S., most of that redevelopment, like strengthening a to handle more antennas, we may pay for that, and a portion of that or all of that gets passed back through to the carriers. That's kinda how it works in the U.S.
What percentage of s in the country, in the United States do you own?
What percentage of s in the U.S. do you own?
In terms of the market share, I mean, we've got in the U.S. a little bit more than 40,000 s, almost 43,000 s. You know, there's two ways to think about it. There's s-
[audio distortion]
It's probably in the range of, you know, the 30% range, 30%-35% range in and around there. There's a couple of ways to think about it. One is just s, which is, you know, which is one kind of universe of assets, but then there's carrier deployments, and a lot of the antennas can be on non- assets as well, like rooftops and things like that. But we've got, you know, we're in that kind of ballpark in terms of percentage of s.
One more question over here.
Could you talk about how each fixed wireless access, the 5G, impact on your business, whether you use s or not?
Yeah.
The question was, how does Fixed Wireless Access impact demand?
Yeah. What, what it does is, it basically uses the, the benefits of the 5G networks, which is higher capacity, lower, faster speeds, lower latency, to give you a faster broadband experience into an in-home environment, to the point where it could be, and it is proving to be competitive with traditional cable companies. What that does is it just opens up a new use case, drives up potential demand on the wireless networks. As that demand on the wireless networks go up, they need more equipment on the s. And that's how we end up, participating in that to the extent that a share of the bandwidth on the wireless networks is consumed by fixed wireless access. That probably means over time, they just have to put more equipment up on the s, and we benefit from that.
I think we've kinda used up our time. It was a great conversation, Rod. Thank you so much for being a part of this. Thank you guys for all joining us. Next up is lunch, upstairs on the fifth floor. But please join us for a conversation with the CEO of Digital Realty, right after lunch.