Smartphones Fuel American Tower Rise As Networks Speed Up

American Tower and Crown Castle International, whose shares have reached records this month, are in a sweet spot: handling a surge in cellular traffic as wireless companies upgrade for a new generation of bandwidth-hungry smartphones and tablets.

As more wireless carriers convert to faster long-term evolution technology, known as LTE, worldwide mobile data traffic will soar 18-fold by 2016, according to Cisco Systems. At the end of last year, 54 service providers offered LTE, according to researcher Maravedis, and about 224 more plan upgrades to the technology. By 2016, 469 million subscribers worldwide could be using LTE networks. That new traffic translates into soaring growth prospects for tower operators, the companies that lease space to the networks for the growing panoply of antennas they require to move all that data around.