News
€133 million deal will help Spanish towers company with migration to 5G
Cellnex Telecom on Monday announced that it has closed the acquisition of Alticom, boosting its presence in the telecoms infrastructure market in the Netherlands.
The €133 million deal gives Spain’s Cellnex 30 towers and long-range sites in the Netherlands, the nature of which will help it with the migration to 5G, it said.
Alticom has tall towers, covering a 15 km radius, with large equipment capacity, and are therefore able to host caching servers for data processing and storage, Cellnex explained.
The deal is the latest in a series for Cellnex, which is a growing presence in the European towers market with a footprint of 21,000-plus sites, including the DAS nodes managed by CommsCon, the Italian small cells specialist the firm acquired in June 2016, and the assets it is in the process of integrating in France, having agreed their acquisition from Bouygues Telecom just over year ago.
When it comes to 5G network architecture, there are a number of issues that need to be resolved, said Tobias Martinez, Cellnex CEO, in a statement.
"The reduction of cells…will be served with a denser network based on distributed antenna systems (DAS) such as those operated by CommsCon,: he said.
"Equally, it is essential that processing and storage capacity and fibre connectivity for broadband content – something known as caching servers – are brought closer to receivers to ensure expected speed and response rates," he said. "This latter issue is precisely one of the lines of work in which Alticom has experience and will add the required expertise to Cellnex’s 5G ecosystem."
Cellnex is also bulking up in other European markets.
Its latest deal came in May, when it headed a consortium that agreed to pay 500 million francs (€458.8 million) for Swiss Towers, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Sunrise Communications that manages a portfolio of 2,239 telecom towers.
