The Path to 5G Profitability for Data Centers, Towers and Real Estate Companies

By 2025, North America will be home to more than 335,000 5G small cells as Communications Service Providers (CSPs) launch and expand fixed wireless access (FWA) services such as residential broadband and enterprise edge computing. That trend is creating major immediate and long-term revenue opportunities for data center operators and commercial real estate owners ? but only if they speak the same language as their prospective CSP customers.

CSPs will need access to hundreds of thousands of additional office buildings, shopping centers, parking garages, apartment complexes and other commercial real estate locations to deploy their small cells. They also will need fiber and data centers to connect their small cells and other base stations to cloud providers to support value-added enterprise applications such as edge computing.

A new white paper explores how data center operators and commercial real estate owners can give themselves a major competitive advantage in the 5G market by speaking the same language that their CSP customers use over 47,000 times each day: iconectiv® TruOps^TM Common Language®. As the industry's authoritative database, Common Language is the resource that CSPs turn to first when looking for new sites, fiber and data centers for network equipment, location and interconnection points. When a CSP finds the infrastructure that meets its requirements using Common Language Codes, they can easily select and implement them into existing network planning and service activation activities.

"Given that Common Language is the industry-standard resource for network planning, CSPs know that it is key in enabling highly informed network design, provisioning and interconnection so that they can roll out high-quality mobile and fixed wireless access services faster and more efficiently," said Peter Ford, Executive Vice President, iconectiv. "It is equally beneficial for data center operators, real estate companies and other tower owners to know about and leverage Common Language to ensure that CSPs can instantly see their entire asset portfolio, fostering new tenants and revenue stream opportunities."

Common Language also provides an industry-standard nomenclature to enable more informed network planning. For example, CSPs use TruOps^TM Common Language® CLLI^TM Codes to instantly identify and verify the location and functionality of network infrastructure such as towers, poles, routers and points of presence. As a result, CLLI Codes also eliminate problems that occur when data center operators, real estate investment trusts (REITs) and other types of tower and site companies provide incomplete or incorrect information or use a nonstandard format.

The new white paper, "Revenue and Differentiation for Tower, Data Center Operators," also explains how most data center operators and real estate companies already use Common Language without realizing it ? but also without leveraging all of its revenue and competitive benefits. One example is when REITs purchased towers and other sites from CSPs for leaseback over the last 20 years. The original CSP owners used Common Language to register detailed information about these assets. When the REIT acquired the portfolio, it was unaware that this information remained in the Common Language database and is still used today. Unless the REIT has a Common Language subscription, the new owner can't take full advantage of CLLI Codes because it has no way to verify and update its site information.

For more information about how data center operators, real estate companies and other tower and site owners can use Common Language, download the white paper, visit the Common Language website, or stop by Booth #815 at Connect(X) 2024 in Atlanta from May 14-16, 2024. iconectiv will also be speaking on the Connect(X) panel, Leveraging Digital Twins Data to Improve Tower and Network Asset Management, on Thursday, May 16 at 8:45 a.m.

About iconectiv

Your business and your customers need to confidently access and exchange information simply, seamlessly and securely. iconectiv's extensive experience in information services, digital identity and numbering intelligence helps you do just that. In fact, more than 5K customers rely on our data exchange platforms each day to keep their networks, devices and applications connected and 2B consumers and businesses protected. Our cloud-based information as a service network and operations management and numbering solutions span trusted communications, digital identity management and fraud prevention. For more information, www.iconectiv.com. Follow us on X and LinkedIn.