The Insider

Travis Morey: Managed tower assets for Nextel. Transferred 1700 Nextel sites to SpectraSite. Then transferred himself to SpectraSite. Oversees the Nextel account. Same people, same meetings, different side of the table. Makes all the difference.

Every time I go to a meeting, I say the same thing: “On behalf of the carriers, no surprises.” I'm here to bring the carrier's perspective to this business. Carriers hate surprises more than anything else. Like when a tower company implements a new fee or operating procedure without adequate visibility or discussion. It's kind of an unfunded mandate: “You must do it this way because we own and operate these sites.” Carriers haven't budgeted for that, so it creates a hardship.

I say, “Look, the dollar amount of a new fee is not the issue; it's how the message is delivered. Is there a buy-in? Is there consensus that this is the right thing to do?”

As new people come on, they always want to show what they're made of and implement changes. At Nextel, I would spend a lot of time bringing the new guy at the tower company up to speed because he didn't understand the business relationship, the things that weren't written down. But I know everybody inside Nextel. I can reach them. I can get the return phone calls, and I think they'll shoot straight with me.

There's a push-pull part of the relationship. The carrier has the checkbook. They want to believe they control this. “This was my site first; I still think I can do anything I want to to it.” Well, no, you really can't because you don't own it anymore, and I have to put other tenants on it. That's the push-pull, but there are ways to manage it.

Nextel has a few things on their drawing board I can lend some assistance to. They have a spectrum-swapping white paper out with the FCC to combine their [non-contiguous] frequencies. They're hoping to get some frequency in the PCS range out of that, and if that happens, more space will be needed on each tower. Also, Cingular transferred more than 4000 towers to SpectraSite. I'm here to make that inventory visible to Nextel. A lot of tower companies are trying to do the same thing, but they don't have the same relationship I do with Nextel. I know they don't.