Crown Castle Inc.

Good day and welcome to the Q2 2026 Crown Castle Earnings Conference Call. All participants will be in a listen-only mode. Should you need assistance, please signal a conference specialist by pressing the star key followed by zero. After today's presentation, there will be an opportunity to ask questions. To ask a question, you may press star, then one on a touch-tone phone. To withdraw your question, please press star and then two. Please note this event is being recorded. I would now like to turn the conference over to Hamilton West, Vice President of Corporate Finance and Treasurer. Please go ahead.

Thank you, Nick, and good afternoon, everyone. Thank you for joining us today as we discuss our second quarter 2026 results. With me on the call this afternoon are Chris Hillebrand, Crown Castle's President and Chief Executive Officer, and Sunit Patel, Crown Castle's Chief Financial Officer. To aid the discussion, we have posted supplemental materials in the investor section of our website at crowncastle.com. that will be referenced throughout the call. This conference call will contain forward-looking statements which are subject to certain risks, uncertainties, and assumptions, and actual results may vary materially from those expected. Information about potential factors which could affect our results is available in the press release and the risk factors section of the company's SEC filings. Our statements are made today as of July 22, 2026, and we assume no obligation to update any forward-looking statements. In addition, today's call includes discussions of certain non-GAAP financial measures. Tables reconciling these non-GAAP financial measures are available in the supplemental information package in the investor section of the company's website at crowncastle.com. With that, let me turn the call over to Chris.

Thank you, Hamilton, and good afternoon, everyone. We delivered solid second quarter results, increased our guidance for full year 2026 AFFO, and continue to execute against our best in class U.S. tower strategy. On May 1st, we completed an important milestone for Crown Castle and became the only publicly traded pure play U.S. tower operator by successfully closing the sale of our small cell and fiber businesses. I want to thank our Crown Castle teammates for the determination and resilience they have shown as we quickly completed this transition and began the next phase of transforming Crown Castle into a best in class U.S. tower operator. Your hard work is making a difference. We now expect to drive additional cost savings this year as we continue to drive operational excellence. Longer term, we will continue to transform Crown Castle, enhancing our operational efficiency and effectiveness by focusing on the following areas. First, we continue to increase land ownership purchases under our towers which improves margins, increases operational control of our assets, and allows us to deliver more quickly for our customers. Second, we are investing in systems that streamline and automate processes, enabling our teammates to make better and faster business decisions. Third, we continue to improve cycle times and our customer experience. In the quarter, we also made progress towards recovering the remaining payments owed under our original DISH agreement. In May, the FCC approved the Echo Star Spectrum sale transaction to AT&T and SpaceX, but made the transactions contingent on the implementation of a $2.4 billion escrow account for the benefit of its vendors. We applaud Chairman Carr for his efforts to advance spectrum policy to maintain U.S. global telecom leadership while implementing protections for U.S. wireless infrastructure providers. Now that DISH Wireless has filed for bankruptcy, we will be pursuing our $3.5 billion contractual claim in the bankruptcy court. The bankruptcy remote escrow account provides a source of funding that is not subject to the normal bankruptcy estate waterfall and is intended to satisfy network-related obligations, including certain infrastructure claims. As I step back and look at the discussions we are having with our customers, I am excited about the multiple demand drivers that we will expect will benefit Crown Castle's future growth including increasing deployment of edge compute infrastructure, continued growth in mobile data demand, and additional spectrum coming to market. As I mentioned last quarter, we have initiated several trials with edge data center providers and continue to see growing interest in how our portfolio can support distributed compute deployments. We believe the edge opportunity is gaining momentum as demand for storage and compute continues to accelerate, while many large data center deployments face multi-year construction and power delivery delays. Crown Castle is positioned well to serve this demand in a capital efficient manner through its nationwide network of tower sites, each with existing power and broadband connectivity, and can provide distributed, move-in ready locations for deployments requiring less than 0.2 megawatts. We are seeing interest from businesses seeking to deploy scale distributed infrastructure to support inference, workloads, and other high-value-add applications, including cybersecurity, fraud detection, and real-time data processing. Additionally, the industry continues to see strong growth in mobile data demand. According to Ericsson, U.S. mobile data consumption per smartphone is expected to more than double over the next five years, from 25 to 52 gigabits per month, driven in part by AI-enabled applications and a projected threefold increase in uplink traffic as devices increasingly transmit video, sensor, and telemetry data to the cloud. We believe the industry will benefit from an infrastructure demand cycle as Chairman Carr and the FCC advance what has been described as the largest spectrum pipeline to date, with at least 800 megahertz of additional spectrum slated to be made available for commercial wireless use over the coming years. In addition to the recently announced Echo Star Spectrum transactions, the FCC has announced its plan to auction at least 165 megahertz between 2026 and 2027. Shifting to a topic that has been top of mind for many investors lately, satellites as a potential alternative to terrestrial networks. Let me summarize the key reasons why we believe that terrestrial networks will continue to be an essential for mobile phone service based on reports available on the WIA website and analysis from cell-side research. First, satellite services generally require a clear line of sight to the sky and provide weaker indoor coverage, which is significant given approximately 90% of mobile usage occurs indoors or in vehicles. Because satellite signals travel hundreds of miles farther than the terrestrial connections, their signal strength is approximately 10,000 times weaker, challenging performance in dense environments where buildings, obstructions, and interference can further degrade the signal. To compensate for the weaker signal, phones must operate at higher transmit power levels, increasing battery consumption. Second, satellite operators have access to significantly less spectrum. Direct-to-device satellite services generally have access to only tens of megahertz of spectrum, while each major U.S. wireless carrier controls hundreds of megahertz. Third, a typical satellite beam covers approximately 100 to 600 square miles versus roughly 3 to 20 square miles for a terrestrial cell site, requiring substantially more users to share the same spectrum resources. This means that for every megahertz of spectrum, Terrestrial cell sites can support 30 times more users. More importantly, as satellite operators seek to improve capacity, mobility, and indoor performance, we believe terrestrial infrastructure will become an increasingly important complement to satellite networks. We believe the long-term outlook for our industry remains bright given continued mobile data demand growth, upcoming spectrum auctions, and the momentum and edge data infrastructure. We believe our clear strategy, investment-grade balance sheet, and capital allocation framework position Crown Castle to maximize long-term shareholder value. With that, I'll turn it over to Sunit to walk us through the details of the quarter.