Nearly 30 years in the telecom towers industry and Bernard Borghei is still just as pumped up
The overall telecom infrastructure segment in the US is extremely attractive and active right now,” says Bernard Borghei CEO of Symphony Towers Infrastructure. And he should know.
It’s been 11 years since Borghei co-founded Vertical Bridge, one of the biggest network infrastructure companies in the US. Vertical Bridge owns and master-leases more than 17,000 towers across the US today, and owns more than 500,000 owned and master-leased sites across the country. Prior to that, Borghei was SVP and partner at Global Tower Partners. After leaving the company in 2022, Borghei had a stint at Tower Engineering Professionals, before he then joined Symphony Wireless, an infrastructure company backed by Palistar Capital.
When Borghei first spoke with DCD, in September 2024, he was CEO of Symphony Wireless, a company that acquires ground leases and easement rights to telecom towers. But a few months on, the picture has changed.
Two Becomes One
In January 2025, Palistar chose to merge Symphony Wireless with CTI Towers, another firm backed by the alternative asset manager. The new single entity is known as Symphony Towers Infrastructure with Borghei as the CEO.
“We had two successful, mid-sized companies operating,” Borghei explains in a second interview conducted following the merger. “Each of us was growing the business well, but we were medium-sized companies.”
Founded in 2019, Symphony Wireless acquired ground leases and easement rights to telecom towers, which it then leased out.
CTI, a telecom tower firm, was founded in 2011 with an investment fromComcast Ventures. Acquired by Palistar in 2020, it owned, managed, and marketed more than 1,800 infrastructure assets across the US prior to the acquisition.
Borghei explains that both companies served similar customers, such as carriers AT&T, Verizon, T-Mobile, and Dish, plus other regional networks operating in the US.
“We thought it’d be nice to combine and have one master approach,” he says. “We had to come back and do our homework, make sure we could do that from all various perspectives with the investors and everybody else involved. Fortunately, it worked.”
The merged company forms what Borghei describes as a “massive platform.” Indeed it is the fifth-largest privately held infrastructure company in the US.
Reaching More Of The Country
The acquisition gives the new entity greater scale, says Borghei. “It makes us more meaningful to our clients, because now we have 3,000 assets to offer them,” he says.
Borghei hopes the merger will also improve the efficiency of the company, something that he believes is important for the long-term success of the business.
The company is some way off the likes of Crown Castle and American Tower Corporation, two of the biggest US tower operators, each with more than 40,000 towers across the country.
In comparison, Symphony Towers Infrastructure operates 3,000 assets across all 50 states.
The strategy for the company isn’t to build towers or acquire new assets in the same way that other towercos operate, says Borghei.
“It all comes down to finding the right creative, strategic opportunities to grow the business,” he says. “We’re not going to go out there and buy things just for the sake of buying things. We’re going to be very strategic.”
Instead, he wants to “organically” leverage the company’s existing assets. “We want to take the existing towers that we have to attract new tenants to colocate on them and drive leases up on these towers,” says Borghei.
He explains that Symphony isn’t interested in building new infrastructure, noting this is the remit of sister company Harmoni Towers. Borghei insists there are no plans to combine Symphony and Harmony into one melody, and says the latter company will continue to play to its own tune.
“As of today, that’s not on the radar at all,” he says when asked about the potential for a further merger. “Harmoni is the tower business, but it’s a different part of the tower business. Building towers requires different talents, processes, and skill sets.
“The duration of building a tower in the US, with all the zoning requirements, is different than us buying assets on the rooftops and things like that. So I have no indications from Palistar that combining us with Harmony is something that they’re looking at.”
5G Is Far From Finished
US carriers are currently in the process of expanding their 5G mobile networks, something that presents a great opportunity for the tower industry, according to Borghei.
“Only 50 percent of the LTE for 5G sites in the US have so far been upgraded, so there’s a lot more activity that needs to take place to change the equipment,” he told DCD in September of last year.
He says that the rate of these deployments to the tower sites will rise as economic conditions change.
“There’s still plenty of [5G] build-out to embark on,” Borghei says. “And we continue to believe and see that as interest rates come down, the US operators will start reinvesting in their network capacity and also expansion of the coverage in the rural areas.”
A few months on, Borghei’s view has not changed, but he notes that the business will continue to evaluate industry trends closely.
“Overall, we see the trend for 5G networks continues to increase, but if something unforeseen happens, such as revenue per user starts really plateauing, or if the subscriber growth plateaus, I think you may see the carriers look to like different avenues to generate revenue profits,” he says.
Borghei points to T-Mobile’s recent acquisition of advertising technology media company Vistar Media as an example of a carrier pivoting to a new channel to diversify its revenue streams.
“Now maybe they have a brilliant plan to tie those locations and use them as part of small cells or whatever that they just haven’t communicated to the industry, but I think it’s pretty interesting that they are trying to find a different way to generate revenue,” he says.
“So we will watch those trends and continue to monitor the growth and stress on the 5G networks and how the carriers are prioritizing allocated capital to it.”
Spectrum Challenges
While 5G presents an opportunity for firms like Symphony Towers, challenges around spectrum that have stifled growth in the last two years remain.
Since March 2023, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has been unable to issue carriers spectrum after the US Senate allowed its authority to hold spectrum auctions to lapse for the first time ever. This means carriers have been unable to deploy additional spectrum.
The change of government could move things along, says Borghei, but he warns that it will take time for this to happen. President Donald Trump appointed Brendan Carr as chair of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) shortly after his election win last year. Carr, who’s been a commissioner since 2017, began the role in January.
At the time of writing, the FCC is still unable to carry out spectrum auctions, meaning carriers remain in limbo.
“It’s going to take some time to get new spectrum made available, because let’s assume [Carr] gets the authority reinstated to auction spectrum, the teams have to go and really choose which part of the spectrum they want to auction first,” Borghei says.
“Normally in our industry, when a spectrum auction happens, it would take a year before the carriers would deploy it. They have to get it tested in their environments to see how it really propagates.”
He explains that this impacts carriers and original equipment manufacturers when it comes to rolling out their technology. The need to resolve the spectrum debacle would help carriers to “stabilize their planning,” he notes.
That said, Borghei is excited for when the spectrum situation is sorted out, in particular suggesting that private network deployments could flourish.
“There’s some privately held spectrum that companies bought in the previous few rounds of auctions, and haven’t really deployed them, and maybe are willing to transact,” he says. “So I think you’re going to see some private spectrum deals take place regionally, within the US, where the carriers need certain bandwidth to help them optimize their network.”
Pumped Up
For now, Symphony has no plans to venture into data center assets, says Borghei, though he doesn’t rule an international expansion if the opportunity is right.
Borghei said last year that Palistar has issued Symphony $1.2 billion to invest in the telecom infrastructure space, which he says is a “massive market.”
“When you look at the number of sites deployed in the US, you’re talking about a few hundred thousand assets available,” Borghei.
This hasn’t changed post-merger, he adds: “I still have plenty of opportunity to grow this business, and Palistar has been encouraging me to do so as well.”
If anything, Borghei says the merger has only made him – and Symphony Towers Infrastructure – more driven to succeed.
“I told our team here when we announced the merger that if this doesn’t get your blood pumping, you might be in the wrong place,” he says. “These types of opportunities are rare.”
