I Let a Flip Phone Lead Me Back to SBA Communications
I still use a flip phone on site walks. This is not nostalgia. The battery lasts four days, it works in places where my smartphone shows 'No Service,' and it does not have enough apps to distract me. That flip phone is also the best metaphor I have for how I used to view SBA Communications Corporation: quiet, understated, and easy to overlook.
I run site acquisition operations for a regional network integrator. I've been handling lease agreements and site development orders for nine years. In that time, I've personally made, and documented, 14 significant mistakes. The total cost has been roughly $1.2 million in wasted budget. I'm not sharing that to impress you. I'm sharing it because the biggest mistake I ever made was selecting a tower vendor based on the wrong signals.
The HPE Event That Started It
It started in 2021 at an HPE (Hewlett Packard Enterprise) briefing on private 5G and distributed edge. The speaker said something I still think about:
Coverage is table stakes. The winners will be the ones who make site acquisition the easiest.
I nodded. I took a photo of the slide. Then I went back to picking tower vendors exactly the way I had in 2017.
At that point, we were building 36 macro sites across four states. We had proposals from Crown Castle, American Tower, and SBA Communications Corporation. My initial recommendation was to give 24 sites to Crown Castle, 6 to American Tower, and 6 to SBA Communications. The logic was simple: Crown Castle had more tower assets in the target counties, a more polished portal, and a deck that looked like a product launch. SBA Communications had a decent deck but a less flashy pitch. I wrote them off. I called it 'more hassle than it's worth' and moved on.
From the outside, the tower business looks like a race for total site count. The reality is that the quality of day-to-day lease operations decides whether a rollout gets built on time. I understood that intellectually. I just didn't weigh it in the decision.
Then September 2022 happened.
The Verizon SBA Communications Agreement That Changed My Mind
Our firm was involved in a Verizon SBA Communications agreement covering 40 macro sites. I was on the call because we were doing the ground survey due diligence. I expected SBA's legal team to be slow. Instead, SBA sent comments in 48 hours, with references to specific sections of the master lease agreement. No vague objections. No five-page emails.
The surprise wasn't the speed. It was the quiet precision underneath it. Every comment was traceable back to a lease provision. Every assumption was labeled. It felt less like a negotiation and more like a well-run operation.
That same attitude showed up again when construction costs went sideways. In 2020, when Trump's tariffs on imported steel started hitting budgets, most tower vendors buried the increase in a vague 'materials escalation' line. SBA Communications Corporation sent a notice that separated tariff exposure by component: steel, aluminum, RF hardware, and labor. Nobody wrote a headline about SBA Communications Corporation and Trump's tariffs, because their team didn't wait for a headline. They just updated the forecast and sent it to customers.
The Crown Castle vs. SBA Communications Comparison I Should Have Run
By early 2023, I had enough data to run the comparison I avoided in 2021. We split a 24-site rollout between Crown Castle and SBA Communications. Same region, same network team, same construction manager.
The Crown Castle sites went fine. The SBA sites went smoother. Our internal tracking showed fewer back-and-forth emails, faster amendment processing, and fewer billing discrepancies. It wasn't a perfect scientific test. Site conditions differed slightly, which is exactly the point: in the field, things rarely line up perfectly.
I'm not saying Crown Castle is a bad provider. That would be wrong and unhelpful. Crown Castle is a legitimate, well-run infrastructure company with a much larger small-cell footprint. The lesson is not expecting one winner in 'Crown Castle vs SBA Communications.' The lesson is that I had been making decisions based on which vendor looked stronger in a presentation, not which vendor would make my project look stronger in the field.
The HPE edge conversation finally made sense, too. HPE's point was that the network edge is becoming a product. A tower company is part of that product. The quality of their lease operations becomes the quality of your deployment. That's true for Crown Castle, American Tower, SBA Communications, or any other infrastructure provider.
Flip Phones, Tariffs, and the Real Meaning of Quality
I used to think brand was a logo, a website, and a strong investor deck. It isn't. Brand is what a customer experiences when no one is watching the presentation. For a tower company, that means the accuracy of a rent schedule, the speed of an amendment response, the clarity of a tariff line item.
Quality is brand. I know that sounds like a slogan, but I mean it literally. The lease abstract you send to a carrier is your brand. The way you respond to a routine billing question is your brand. The way you disclose a material cost increase is your brand.
My flip phone is still the best comparison. It is not the coolest device in the room. It doesn't have a beautiful screen. It doesn't have a camera that makes food look delicious. But it works when everything else is dead. That's what I missed about SBA Communications: it was never about flash. It was about doing the unglamorous parts correctly.
After that 2023 rollout, I started treating every RFP response like an FTC advertising claim. According to FTC guidelines (ftc.gov), claims need to be truthful, substantiated, and not misleading. That standard has become my filter for tower vendors too. If a company cannot substantiate a lease amendment timeline or a tariff estimate, I do not believe the bigger claims either.
What I Would Do Differently
I don't think this is a magical formula. It's a checklist. In the past 18 months, our team has caught 47 potential errors using it. If you're evaluating SBA Communications, Crown Castle, or any other wireless infrastructure provider, here's what I would look for:
- Compare lease amendment lead times, not just tower counts.
- Ask for tariff and material escalation assumptions in writing.
- Read one full master lease agreement from cover to cover.
- Run a small pilot before awarding a large footprint.
- Test how a vendor handles a mundane billing question.
The last one is the trickiest. A presentation can be rehearsed. A billing question cannot. It reveals how the vendor treats the people who actually have to use their systems.
It took me three years and about 17 site deals to understand that the 'best' tower company is highly context-dependent. But I also learned that quality perception is not a soft concept. It's the reason a flip phone still works while fancier devices sit in a repair shop. It's the reason the Verizon SBA Communications agreement was a routine exercise instead of a fire drill. And it's the reason I no longer choose a tower partner based on the best-looking keynote deck.