AT&T and Verizon have hired Tillman Infrastructure to build hundreds of small cell towers around the country.
Tillman already builds, owns, and operates a series of towers and small cells. Tillman will build new towers for AT&T and Verizon, which have agreed to lease and co-anchor the towers.
According to Verizon, the new towers will be added in areas where others don’t already exist and will give AT&T and Verizon the opportunity to move equipment from old (expensive) towers to the new (cheaper) ones. Tillman is expected to begin work on the new towers as soon as the first quarter of 2018. AT&T and Verizon engineers will install networking equipment and turn the sites on as quickly as they can. Tillman will have the opportunity to build hundreds more sites if the initial batch are completed successfully.
Neither AT&T nor Verizon said which network technologies will be installed on the towers. Separately, both companies are pursuing various paths towards 5G with technologies including mmWave.
