We prepared a white paper on the provision and aggregation of land for the telecoms industry, linked to proposed amendments to the draft Gigabit Infrastructure Act

The problem

• APWireless commissioned Analysys Mason to prepare a white paper on the provision and aggregation of land for the telecoms industry
• This stemmed from the fact that regulation of access to land used for deploying telecoms networks has been included as part of the European Parliament’s proposed amendments to the draft Gigabit Infrastructure Act (GIA)
• These amendments would require landowners to negotiate lease agreements based on fair and reasonable terms and prices with access seekers(i.e. mobile operators or towercos), and would mean disputes between access seekers and landowners could be raised with a dispute settlement body

The solution

• We provided an overview of the mobile sector, presented what ‘access to land’ meant in that context, and assessed the demand for mobile sites and the number of land interactions to 2030 (see chart)
• We then reviewed the market for land access to determine its main characteristics (the cost of land as part of mobile operators’ total costs, the evolution of this cost, the increasing use of the ground-lease buy-out (GLBO) model and the concentration of tower ownership versus land ownership) and inform our conclusions
• We concluded that applying ‘blanket’ regulation to land access would not be appropriate in light of the specific dynamics and issues associated with each type of land access and that the impacts of the proposed regulation were likely to be negative for the deployment of telecoms infrastructure

Figure: Types of land access interactions, and corresponding proportions to 2030

The result

• Our report was published at https://www.analysysmason.com/consulting/reports/land-providers-ec-planned-gigabit-infrastructure-act/
• A presentation was also delivered to policy makers and stakeholders in Brussels to emphasise our findings and potential impacts on the land market