The current fiber industry landscape bears a striking resemblance to the cable industry of the 1990s and the wireless sector of the early 2000s. To bury lead: what happened then – is what I think will happen now. The cable and wireless “orphans” got adopted and at the...

Tower stocks have been up ~ 15% (1) year-to-date and have significantly outperformed data centers of late. The reasons for this are not overly surprising: lower interest rates, market rotation toward ‘safer’ investment models, the overhang around...

When American Tower (AMT) purchased Coresite in 2021, it represented a sea change for the industry as it was the first time a data center and tower company locked arms. Looking back, it seems this line was cast with great purpose and strategic thought. From an...

The phrase “long pole in the tent” is often used when discussing the relationship between power and data centers.  In our conversations with both the platforms behind and management teams of data centers we are seeing a strong urgency to hire dedicated power...

Reading a recent LinkedIn post by the founder of the data center Hawk group I found perfectly summarized what we are seeing in data centers in 13 short words / acronyms. It read as follows: Millions --> Billions. Megawatts --> Gigawatts. CPUs --> GPUs....

The great cable cowboy, John Malone, once famously said: “We lost no major ground by waiting to invest. Unfortunately, pioneers in cable technology often have arrows in their back.” He made this comment during his tenure as the CEO of the cable company TCI.  In...

A recent article in Business Insider indicated Amazon is planning to cut its office space footprint by ~ 10 percent over the next three to five years.  The end results of these moves are expected to save the company $1.3B / year in operating expenses. To put this...

The definition of Digital Infrastructure continues to stretch.  This was my immediate thought when I saw the news earlier this month that Boldyn Networks would be buying Apogee Telecom. Apogee was not a name with which I was overly familiar but when I read about...

With all the earnings news and analyst days in the telecom space the past few weeks, one important talking point that seemed to be missed by almost every analyst report I read, but may be an important harbinger of things to come, came from AT&T’s CEO John Stankey...

Happy New Year to all the Fritzsche Forum readers. As the calendar turns, we always take our best guess as to the key trends to watch. Here is our best guess for what we believe will be a wild and crazy 2024… 1. CABLE WIRELESS AND TELECOM FWA TUG OF WAR WILL CONTINUE...

Now that the large cap telecom players have all reported Q3’23 earnings, it is a good time for reflection to review the lessons learned and trends which abound in the space. When I was an analyst I followed T-Mobile.  While everyone was focused on the unique...

The words “we need a bigger boat” have been used in some recent Wall Street write ups when describing the data center space.  But listening to the announcements coming out of Mobile World Congress (MWC) last month in Las Vegas from the Fixed Wireless Access (FWA)...

I remember when I was a young analyst and the great John Stanton (wireless pioneer who was CEO of two public companies -  Western Wireless and VoiceStream - at the same time) would speak at conferences.  He had a great way of using analogies which would...

Recently, I was sitting in a meeting with the head of a large infrastructure fund.  During the course of our discussion I was pitching ideas in different silos of the digital infrastructure space.  It was interesting because this particular client was one of...

While I no longer sit in the analyst chair, sometimes I get reach outs from contacts seeking my opinion about themes impacting the industry. One such inbound came this past week when someone asked my thoughts on the recent Fortune article (Why AT&T and Verizon’s...

Ask any of the telecos’ management teams how the week of July 10th was and they may all growl at you. If anyone has followed the news flow this week related to telecom, they will know that this was a week many telecos will want to forget. It all began with the July...

When I was an analyst one of my most memorable trips was to Monroe, LA.  Why?  Well, it was perhaps the ONLY domestic trip I ever took that did NOT offer a direct flight from O’Hare.  Still to this day 20 years later, that in and of itself makes this...

That was my first thought when we saw the (very surprising) news at ConnectX around the Vertical Bridge (VB) and Verizon (VZ) joint press release on May 9th.  While exact financial details were not disclosed, the two companies are creating an LLC and share the...

Earlier this year at the MetroConnect conference in Fort Lauderdale, there seemed to be some concerns about Zayo. These worries centered around many things. Integration of 40+ companies was harder and longer than hoped: despite Zayo’s size and scale, Zayo was still...

At recent conferences and industry chit chats, there has been a lot of talk about fiber players pulling back. The laundry list of reasons is not overly surprising or really that unique. They include things like supply chain delays, labor shortages, inflation, etc....

Late last month, American Tower (AMT) and Qualcomm announced a collaboration to “advance network architecture and accelerate near-edge applications.”  I have been on record as saying that Edge is (finally) more than a whiteboard concept.  This collaboration...

The past few days, I used the weekend to clean out my office.  This is always such a ‘fun’ (and funny!) exercise as I typically find myself going down the rabbit hole of memories after finding a note from my kids or a picture from when they were young.  ...

As the calendar turns to 2023, it is prediction time!  So, without further ado, here are our Top 10: 1. Spotlight on IoT – Like Edge was in 2022, 2023 will be the year when IoT becomes more than a ‘whiteboard concept.’   Europe has set the precedent. ...

This past week we heard from the “big guys” (AT&T, Verizon, Comcast, Charter) on Q4 2022 earnings. Many big themes came out but fiber was the clear topic of interest for AT&T investors. The quick elevator summary was AT&T is slowing the roll out a bit in...

This past weekend, I was in Orlando at a soccer tournament with my 15 year old daughter.  Given we had some time to kill before our flight, I decided to take her on a field trip of sorts and we drove to Lake Nona, one of the first master planned communities. I...

A few weeks ago I was lucky to be a part of the Georgetown's Center for Business Inaugural Spectrum Summit.  The session which I hosted was all about private networks.  Private networks, like “Edge”, have been talked about much but there has been very little...

Coming off Q3 2022 earnings season, it was interesting to note the different talking points around Fixed Wireless Access (FWA) offerings.  Two carriers (T-Mobile and Verizon) are quite bullish while AT&T continues to take a more conservative stance.  The...

When I was an analyst, I remember at one of our 5G conferences in 2017 when we turned it over to the audience for questions, there was a noticeable turn from the “typical” questions. Why do I remember this?  It was because a wise investor was connecting dots...

A recent interview on Fox Business News with John Stankey (CEO of AT&T) and Wendall Weeks (CEO of Corning) offered some very interesting tidbits which (quite surprisingly) did not seem to get the attention it may have deserved from the Street. I say this because...

People who have read my write-ups have often seen me borrow one of my favorite quotes from Ray LaChance – CEO of ZenFi – “wireless needs wires.”  It is true.  But maybe “wires” take precedence over “wireless” in some cases? Evidence of this may be the 8/1...

There has been a lot of talk about AT&T's and Verizon’s Q2 earnings.  While there have been a slew of earnings since then, I think it is worth peeling back the onion a bit here and framing what we heard in the context of past cyclical patterns. On its call,...

There has been much negativity directed toward small cells.  When Crown Castle adjusted their pipeline downward last year, this negativity seemed to feed on itself.  Many wrote this sector off completely.   I never really understood this...

There has been so much talk about the fact that Cable is under pressure in its consumer broadband business as the telecom players have (finally) woken up to the need for more fiber.  But perhaps investors are not looking at another lurking issue in cable’s...

“Strange Bedfellows” was the phrase that popped into my head when I read Zayo’sMay 10th press release.  While I was not surprised to see Zayo's news about the network expansion and 400G upgrade (under DigitalBridge and EQT, Zayo will never be accused of...

In my past write ups, we have tackled the edge theme with my token tagline being: “Edge is more than just a white board concept.” I was pleased to see that there was tangible ‘meat on the bone’ evidence of this concept this past week.  Specifically, EdgePresence,...

A walk with my dog recently showed many of the pictured lawn signs in my neighborhood. Living less than 15 miles from Chicago (in a dense neighborhood) one has to wonder what took so long for Big Blue to see the need?. There has been much “talk-about” that cable is...