Canada’s Tower One adds to LatAm footprint

Vancouver-based Tower One Wireless further expanded its tower footprint in Latin America, with 14 new sites built for telecom operators in Colombia and Ecuador in December.

In 2022, the group built a total of 172 towers in its core markets of Colombia, Ecuador and Mexico. Those works reached a peak was August, when 26 new towers were deployed.

With that, Tower One reached 348 towers in these three countries, with 382 tenants for those sites. Tenants refer to the number of customer leases per tower. For example, one customer leasing space in five towers counts as five tenants.

In December, Tower One said it built seven towers each in Colombia and Ecuador, all in the built-to-suit (BTS) format. All of the sites have a rental period of 10 years and were greenfield projects. They are spread across both urban and rural areas.

The new towers in Colombia were set up in Nuqui, Litoral del San Juan, Nóvita and Bajo Baudo (Chocó department), Ituango and Taraza (Antioquia), and Valle del Cauca (Cali department).

In Ecuador, they were all deployed in Guayas province, in the localities of Durán, Daule, Samborondon and provincial capital Guayaquil.

In addition to the 14 new towers delivered in the built-to-suit format, Tower One also said it completed the construction of six towers in both markets under the built-as-a-service model. 

In this format, Tower One provides full turnkey operations for customers, from site acquisition to integration.

The group's chief clients are Telefónica, which is a tenant for roughly 38% of its sites, WOM Colombia (31%), Millicom’s Tigo Colombia (24%), Mexico’s Altán Redes (4%), Claro Colombia (3%) and DirecTV Colombia (1%). 

Other clients include AT&T in Mexico and CNT in Ecuador.

During the second quarter of 2022, the company received a US$2.66mn loan from a local bank in Ecuador, of which US$1.95mn is expected to be used to expand in the country. The loan is unsecured and bears interest of 11% per annum.