AST SpaceMobile interviews American Tower's CTO live at the BlueWalker 3 satellite launch

Thank you, Scott. It's a pleasure to be here.

Sure, absolutely. First of all, it's fantastic to be here tonight, so thank you to the AST team for having us join you in this historic evening. American Tower is the leading global tower company, and we operate over 225,000 towers around the world. We also are in a data center business. We work in 25 different countries.

Absolutely. So I've been in this business for a long time, about 35 plus years in wireless. I've been in engineering systems over 40 years. In wireless, I started out working on 1G. We put in analog systems. I worked in the New York metro area building out cell towers, and they serve urban communities and rooftops, and frankly the five boroughs in New York City. Analog cellular was a tough business, and it was hard to get sites. Fast forward, I did 2G, 3G, did a number of startups. I worked on some of the newer technologies that are coming in today when I was at Qualcomm. But I joined American Tower about five years ago because we had an idea about looking at what the world is going to be like beyond towers. Frankly, when you think about the satellite community and how that's transforming the way coverage can be extended to areas where towers are just maybe uneconomic, that's something that really excited me. In this long career, there's a lot of transformations that occur. We've gone from analog to digital, from 1G to 5G, but the same fundamental challenges exist: how do we get coverage through all parts of the world so everybody can have the pleasure and the opportunity to be connected to society in the way we live and operate today.

So I first connected with AST back in 2019, so it's about a little over three and a half years ago. The vision and the mission were so clear, and the business model also very clear. Then the question was, how is it going to get done? How is the technology going to come together? Whether it's the spectrum aspects or the underlying principles, there was an opportunity to raise the capital to make this a reality. So we wanted to be part of that journey. From the first time we met, the team visited us in Boston at our headquarters at American Tower and went down to Midland. We saw the excitement around putting that facility together. I think you were part of that early journey with us, thinking about how the company is going to raise the capital to bring this to market. Over the last few years, it's been an interesting ride, and we've been part of that as an investor. I'm a board member of the company, so I get to see a lot of the things that are not only the challenges but the true opportunities and the business as it's becoming reality. One of the things that really excited me was the fact that the mission fit so well with what we try to do at American Tower. From a satellite perspective, AST can build coverage, and what we need to do to build the service capacity, there's tremendous demand for these capabilities and services. When we looked at that from an American Tower perspective, it seemed natural to get behind that. People might have thought, how does a tower company fit? But for me, it was obvious that this is something we should be supportive of and should be helping find its way. One of the areas we thought about strategically, given our real estate portfolio globally in all the markets, is to take a look at the satellite infrastructure on the ground. There's a satellite, but there's also gateways that one has to connect to, and then those gateways connect to the internet and other fundamental components of the telecommunications infrastructure. We can help make that happen.

So my role when I came to American Tower is really to look at the future, look at the future of technology, think about innovations that are coming to the tower business, but more importantly, how do we extend the tower business into different opportunities related to not only every G of wireless but the things around the tower? Whether it's the infrastructure for the satellite gateways, whether it's fiber networks, whether it's being able to add power as a service, the broader technology roadmap really is fundamental to wireless and the growth of wireless. Towers are always going to be there, they're fundamental, but there's always going to be a need to build around the towers new technologies and innovations that help extend that coverage and capacity. We have a common mission in the sense that we want to support our customers, which are the mobile operators. The mobile operators are the ones trying to serve the consumer and the businesses. When we think about their needs, some of those require common infrastructure, shared infrastructure, what we call neutral host. The satellite system from AST and the towers are so fundamentally the same when it comes to being a neutral host, so that people could share infrastructure that would be hard for them to do on their own. That's where I think a lot of these pieces come together. Towers and satellites will cooperate, we'll work together, we can see coverage extending.

Thank you for having me.