Neutral hosts

The telecom landscape is changing. New dynamics are in place, fueled by an abundance of private and public investment in digital infrastructure, evolving regulations, CSP strategies and ESG objectives. It’s a chance for infrastructure companies to expand their role and explore new digital opportunities.

Deploying high-performance networks will benefit consumers and enterprises with solutions enabling various experiences. Infrastructure companies – such as TowerCos, FiberCos and data center companies – can play a critical role in this deployment.

By offering CSP and enterprise customers an innovative win-win model, they can provide multi-tenant, multi-domain infrastructure as a service at significantly reduced costs to boost or accelerate network deployments. Private Equity (PE) firms lead this business model shift, injecting considerable capital into “hard” network infrastructure.

Neutral Hosts are companies that invest/build/manage network infrastructure assets for long-term recurring multi-tenancy revenue. These companies are involved in both passive and active infrastructure, and the active services include residential broadband, connectivity-as-a-service (aaS), indoor and rural coverage, network densification, smart cities, etc. In addition, there are investment funds that take an operational control in the company they invest in.

In a Neutral host model or wholesale model, infrastructure companies lease their infrastructure assets to multiple tenants, recouping their network build costs by hosting various CSPs on the same foundation. This shared infrastructure model enables the following:

• Accelerated availability of advanced CSP services, such as in-building 5G connectivity, Gigabit fiber broadband and expansion of 5G coverage to under-served areas
• Environmentally-sound alternative to individual operator deployments in dense areas, such as in-building, venues, or outdoor urban settings
• Private 5G network operation for enterprises
• Simplified access to edge computing capabilities, unlocking critical, latency-sensitive and massively data-consuming applications in various industries such as healthcare, logistics, automotive, and manufacturing

TowerCos, FiberCos and datacenter companies operating in a neutral host model are constantly scouting the horizon and building proofs of concept for tomorrow’s use cases, forging partnerships for accelerated profitability maximization. Learn more about Neutral hosts in this article on the Neutral Host model.

Companies that combine several assets.

A combination of any of those five types of companies and include Infracos that have been divested from Telecommunication Providers.

Traditionally, the core business of Neutral hosts, or infrastructure companies (InfraCos), has been the basic colocation of “passive” infrastructure assets in a wholesale model, where they are leasing space for antennas on a tower or servers in a data center. Now, they’re digitally transforming and exploring new, more complex “active” offerings, which constitute elements of a Network-as-a-Service portfolio.

This evolution of the digital infrastructure business toward adopting new use cases allows Neutral hosts to maximize the monetization of their infrastructure assets and drive the increase of their tenancy ratios.

These can take the Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) model, offering parts of their infrastructure as a service to the CSPs or enterprises, e.g., dark fiber leasing. Moving further up the chain, these offerings can take the Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) model, where InfraCos – in a similar business model to webscalers – offer an active network as a platform on which CSPs can provide their content and services to consumers and enterprises.

Eventually, Neutral hosts will become an integral part of an ecosystem, together with CSPs and webscalers, providing high-end active connectivity to end users, enabling the Metaverses for consumers and enterprises.  

Our mission is to help Neutral hosts in their digital transformation to evolve toward a profitable platform-as-a-service model that will benefit the whole telecom industry.