What AT&T, Verizon and T-Mobile don’t want you to know about their 5G deployments

For all the talk about 5G, operators still prefer to keep some things to themselves, such as exactly how many 5G cell sites they’re deploying. CTIA, which lobbies for the big wireless carriers in the US, has estimated the industry may need more than 800,000 small cells by 2026. But you’re not going to get the individual companies to readily reveal exactly how many 5G cell sites—macro plus small cells and everything in between—they’re deploying. Wall Street investment firm MoffettNathanson, relying on public record requests, conducted extensive research into the number of small cells deployed in some of the nation’s largest cities. MoffettNathanson obtained detailed data for about 15,000 small cell locations across New York, Boston, Chicago, Houston, Sacramento and Cincinnati. While acknowledging that the data was imperfect and didn’t completely reveal the inner workings of small cell networks, they concluded on a high level that while small cells were growing like weeds, the expectations for their long-term return potential probably should be tempered.