Tony Peduto carved out a niche in the digital infrastructure business by snapping up towers that cable companies no longer needed, unlocking their hidden value. It began when Comcast Ventures founded CTI Towers in 2011 with Peduto as CEO, later adding cabler Mediacom Communications’ more than 360 towers to its portfolio of Comcast’s tower assets. Now he’s at it again, this time with GTC Towers, founded in 2023, and backed by PE firm Norwest Venture Partners. In its first 18 months of operation, GTC, also known as Grande Towers, has become one of the fastest-growing tower owners in the country, according to the company. Peduto came out of retirement one year ago to take the CEO position at GTC. A pending deal with Altice USA will take the company to 200 towers across key U.S. markets.
After you close the deal to buy Altice USA’s tower assets, are you looking at other roll-ups down the line? And what’s your thinking about the footprint for GTC moving ahead?
Before the Altice deal was announced, we did nine transactions in a year’s time. And not only towers; we look at other areas where you can unlock value. We completed two marketing agreements on short line railroads. And what we’ve realized is that the railroads don’t only own the rights-of-way along the tracks, they also own parcels of land they purchased to create a buffer zone to appease a government. Now there’s an opportunity to put up towers in these industrial areas. We also look at towers that others may not see a value in and it’s not only the cable TV towers. We’ve done broadcast towers and we’re building new towers.
As for our ultimate footprint, we’ll absolutely be nationwide. The Altice deal takes us all the way out to California where they have five sites we’re picking up, along with sites in Arizona, Texas, Oklahoma, all the way up into New York and Long Island – some great locations. There are plenty of opportunities domestically. I’ve talked to some brokers who say some developers were waiting for that second tenant to come along, and now they’re starting to see those applications coming in. They expect a robust market to come in the fall of this year. Internationally, there are a lot of opportunities, but you’ve got to make sure you have scale, along with a stable currency and a stable government.
It’s been nearly a year since you put retirement plans on hold to accept the CEO position at GTC. During that time, what do you see as your greatest accomplishments?
First off, I got out of retirement because my golf game didn’t get any better! But now the highlight certainly has been building a team. We’ve got folks I’ve worked with in the past and others that have come in with years of expertise. We just hired our CFO [Angela Lobas] who came to us after 13 years at Crown Castle. We’ve got another woman in California who came from a site acquisition firm, and we just hired a director of strategic initiatives who we focused a lot on the railroads. And now that we’ve proven our growth trajectory, we’re getting a lot of inquiries about job opportunities. Building the team is a highlight. A year ago, we were doing deals about once a month and that takes a lot of effort and coordination.
What do you see as the greatest growth catalysts in the domestic tower industry?
Right now, the carriers must deploy their 5G spectrum. The initial run was deploying it on sites where they already had equipment – that was just a quick go-out, do an amendment, and get that equipment on those towers. Now they’ve got to do their in-fill, because the signals for 5G don’t necessarily travel as far and they’ve got to do some cell splitting. That’s the next wave, and the engineering firms have been busy for the last eight months developing it. It usually goes to the three publicly traded companies, because that’s where the carriers can get their scale, and then it trickles down to the secondary and tertiary tower companies that have strategic towers located in areas where they don’t have to worry about getting bashed at a zoning hearing because they want to put up another tower. And we get them on an existing tower quickly.
What impact do you expect the surge in demand for data center capacity to have across the digital infrastructure ecosystem and how might that play out?
It’s a big demand. The biggest issue data centers have is getting the requisite power they need for their sites. It’s not only DataBank and EdgeConneX looking at building a data center for third parties. You also have third parties like Meta, which is looking at building data centers in some remote areas to serve their needs. Clearly, that demand is not going to slow down anytime soon. And with all the internet service providers trying to push out to the edge and get quicker response times, and high frequency traders looking at milliseconds to be on the front side to make their trades, there’s no question that data centers are critical. They say a connected car uses 3,000 times more data in a day than a normal person would use in a month. The data centers are going to be at the forefront of that.
Is there a pet issue that you’d like to air out here?
One thing I would like to point out is the work that NATE has done recently on behalf of the contractors. NATE’s trying to get contractors more money and get away from matrix pricing that doesn’t work. And recently, the Verizon-Frontier deal stipulated that they’re going to revamp all the pricing for the contractors. AT&T recently announced they’re going to acquire Lumen’s Mass Markets fiber business, and it looks like there’s going to be some concessions made for the contractors. This is good because NATE said they lost a number of company members in the last two years because they went out of business or moved into other fields, such as EV charging stations. They can’t afford to do it with the matrix pricing. Contractors and the tower climbers that have helped grow this industry deserve to earn a good wage. And the industry has been very healthy. NATE President & CEO Todd Schlekeway and the membership have done a good job bringing this issue to the forefront, working with the FCC and getting some concessions. Tower companies also have a role to play in supporting these efforts. We should be looking at only hiring NATE-certified companies, so that it’s not a race for the bottom. I want trained people that can climb towers safely and get home at night.
By Paul Heine, Inside Towers Contributing Analyst
Paul Heine has covered radio/audio, media and marketing since 1985. He has held senior editorial management positions at Inside Radio, Radio & Records, Billboard Radio Monitor and the Friday Morning Quarterback (FMQB). Heine has also reported and analyzed media news and trends for Adweek, Mediaweek, Billboard and The Hollywood Reporter; appeared on “Today” and Fox News; and has been quoted in the New York Times, Entertainment Weekly, the Los Angeles Times, USA Today and other publications. He began his career in on-air and programming positions at radio stations in Buffalo and Rochester, NY.
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