Crown Castle Q2 2026 Results: Increasing Land Ownership Under Their Towers

Crown Castle’s Q2/2026 results mark the first full quarter as a “pure-play” US tower company, following the May 1, 2026 completion of the sale of its Fiber and Small Cell businesses to Zayo and EQT for $8.4 billion in net proceeds. With the transformation now closed, the firm has shifted from executing the divestiture to operating the streamlined business, emphasizing operating efficiencies, land ownership, and system modernization.  As noted below, Crown Castle deployed the sale proceeds and raised its full-year AFFO guidance for the first time since the reset began.

Overall Highlights:

• Proceeds from the completed fiber/small cell sale fully deployed: $1 billion in share repurchases (retiring over 11 million shares at $88.66/share) and $7.2 billion of debt repaid ($5 billion floating rate + $1.75 billion unsecured notes)
• Second quarter organic growth of 3.9%
• Continued focus on 3 business priorities as a pure-play operator:
  • Drive operating efficiencies and modernize systems (targeting ~200 bps of EBITDA margin expansion)
  • Preserve value in the DISH agreement, with a pursuit of $3.5 billion contractual claim in DISH’s bankruptcy
  • Become best-in-class US tower operator
• Continuing the drive to increase tower land ownership beneath its towers
• $36M spent on purchases of land interests (125% higher than Q2/2025 — $16M); capital expenditures rose 48% year-over-year, primarily driven by a $20M increase in land capex
• On a six-month basis, land interest purchases were $68M through June 30, 2026 versus $34M in the first half of 2025 (up 100%)

Quotable: Reason for Crown Castle accelerating its lease buyout program with property owners

“First, we continue to increase land ownership purchases under our towers, which improves margins, increases operational control of our assets and allows us to deliver more quick for our customers.”

Christian Hillabrant

Quotable: Goal to narrow delta between American Tower, SBA and Crown Castle in the lease buyout space

“We have roughly 11% delta between ourselves and American and SBA. We aim to close that gap over the next couple of years.”

Christian Hillabrant

Quotable: Key Reasons Why Satellites Will NOT Replace Terrestrial Cell Phone Towers

“First, satellite services generally require a clear line of sight to the sky and provide weaker indoor coverage, which is significant given approximately 90% of mobile usage occurs indoors or in vehicles. Because satellite signals travel hundreds of miles farther than terrestrial connections, their signal strength is approximately 10,000 times weaker, challenging performance in dense environments where buildings, obstructions, and interference can further degrade the signal. To compensate for the weaker signal, phones must operate at higher transmit power levels, increasing battery consumption. Second, satellite operators have access to significantly less spectrum.

Second, satellite operators have access to significantly less spectrum.  Direct-to-device satellite services generally have access to only tens of megahertz of spectrum, while each major U.S. wireless carrier controls hundreds of megahertz.

Third, a typical satellite beam covers approximately 100 to 600 square miles versus roughly 3 to 20 square miles for a terrestrial cell site, requiring substantially more users to share the same spectrum resources. This means that for every megahertz of spectrum, terrestrial cell sites can support 30 times more users. More importantly, as satellite operators seek to improve capacity, mobility, and indoor performance, we believe terrestrial infrastructure will become an increasingly important complement to satellite networks.

Christian Hillabrant

Quotable: If Crown Castle has seen any changes in the wireless carriers in their new cell tower builds or lease renewals that are in more rural or remote footprint due to satellite

“No. Nothing.”

Christian Hillabrant