Thomas Steven

ATC - American Tower Germany

ATC - American Tower Germany is a subsidiary of American Tower, Corp., Boston, located in Ratingen and Munich. American Tower is one of the world's largest operators of independent passive infrastructure for mobile communications, with approximately 220,000 cell sites in 25 countries worldwide. American Tower has invested more than USD 45 billion in mobile infrastructure worldwide over the past decade. We build a large number of new cell towers worldwide every year. Since 2012, we have also been buying, building and operating mobile sites in Germany - currently more than 14,600 - and leasing them to mobile network providers, security agencies and regional mobile broadband providers for the installation of antennas. We intend to continue to invest significantly and sustainably in new infrastructure in Germany to improve mobile coverage. Our business model as an independent operator of passive infrastructure (''neutral host'') is distributed worldwide and is a valuable factor in broadband roll-out. A neutral provider of communications infrastructure offers a number of advantages: Our sites are designed to be shared by all network operators, regional providers and innovative service providers. This ensures that the infrastructure is set up and used as efficiently as possible and in a way that saves costs and resources. For the users, in particular, the high effort and the high upfront costs for the deployment of the tower, which are covered by the independent operator such as ATC are eliminated. This also reduces the number of additional towers in a region.