South Wireless Summit 2024
Todd Schlekeway presented a state of the industry from the communications contractor’s perspective to the South Wireless Summit yesterday in Nashville. The President and CEO of NATE: the Communications Industry Contractors Association, spoke on the marketplace, safety, workforce development, legislative, regulatory issues and initiatives currently confronting the contractor community. Schlekeway met separately with Inside Towers to discuss his presentation.
“When it comes to the marketplace, it’s not a secret,” Schlekeway told Inside Towers. “2023 and the first quarter of 2024 has really been a slow down on the wireless side. In my almost 12 years at NATE, it’s been the most difficult environment on the wireless side.”
Outside of the wireless industry pause, the contractor marketplace faces other challenges including low margin, non-negotiable, unit pricing; one-sided and unreasonable MSA terms; navigating third-party onboarding platforms; and the inflation/interest rate environment.
Schlekeway stressed the need for smaller contractors to be creative to maintain their businesses. “It’s very important to diversify your customer base or position your company to try to do so. There are opportunities that touch wireless, but may not be traditional macro tower work,” he said.
At the recent NATE UNITE 2024 Conference, the association hosted several customer business diversification workshops. Several different verticals were represented, such as the electric vehicle infrastructure charging industry and fiber deployments, which represent opportunities for communications industry contractors.
“The FAA also came in and did a federal government onboarding and talked about their Unstaffed Infrastructure Sustainment (UIS) projects coming up, where they’re replacing hundreds of towers over the next couple of years,” Schlekeway said.
Other opportunities mentioned by Schlekeway include BEAD program funding, increased small cell deployment activity, in-building wireless installations, and private LTE/5G networks. “We think that in the in-building wireless install space, especially when it comes to public safety with the increased use of building codes, there’s a lot of work that’s coming. So we’re pretty bullish on that,” he said.
Schlekeway and NATE are still assessing the impact on communications industry contractors of Ericsson’s departure from having self-performing, in-house crews. “I think there’s going to be more subcontracting opportunities for contractors in the AT&T-Ericsson OPEN RAN commercial scale deployments down the road,” he said. “It’s something we’re monitoring, but that was definitely a sea change.”
On the whole, Schlekeway was optimistic. “Wireless is going to bounce back in a strong way. It’s just, when will that take place?” he said.
By J. Sharpe Smith, Inside Towers Technology Editor
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