- American Tower sued Dish last year after it became clear it wasn’t living up to its contractual obligations
- The tower company isn’t saying exactly how much Dish owes them, but Dish’s annual contributions to its revenue is about $200 million
- Dozens of vendors are trying to get the FCC to impose conditions on EchoStar’s spectrum deals to force the company to pay up
American Tower President and CEO Steven Vondran told investment analysts this week that he wants to make sure everyone knows they’ve “derisked” their business by taking Dish Wireless out of the company’s financial guidance going forward.
That may sound like “duh,” given it was clear that EchoStar subsidiary Dish wasn’t paying its tower vendors, but apparently the majority of financial analysts weren’t baking that into their projections for American Tower’s results.
“Relative to consensus, guidance was bit of a mess with consensus largely having included EchoStar in the numbers even though we knew they weren’t paying their bills,” wrote New Street Research (NSR) analyst David Barden in a note for investors.
American Tower disclosed in an 8-K SEC filing in January that Dish had failed to make tower rental payments. This came after American Tower had filed suit in a Colorado court in October 2025 seeking a declaratory ruling that Dish was not excused of its contract obligations.
NSR at that time noted the disclosure was unsurprising given a similar revelation from Crown Castle and noted that it was taking EchoStar payments fully out of its 2026 estimated financials for American Tower. Previously, the analyst firm had removed EchoStar’s payments from its estimates but only the second half of 2026 and beyond.
American Tower’s ‘ballpark estimates’
During American Tower’s Q4 earnings call on Tuesday, Vondran stopped short of giving a number when Raymond James & Associates analyst Ric Prentiss asked exactly how much Dish owes them. Crown Castle previously revealed it’s owed $3.5 billion.
But Vondran did say that Dish’s revenue contributions amounted to about $200 million annually through 2035 and into 2036.
“So that gives you guys kind of the ballpark on that. We haven't put a specific number out there and don't plan to put a precise number on it, but that gives you guys kind of the ZIP code of where that exposure is or what the opportunity is actually now that it's out of the numbers,” he said.
The litigation with Dish is “going to take time to work out,” Vondran said. “We don't necessarily expect this to get resolved this year. We hope it does, but we don't necessarily expect it to.”
According to American Tower, Dish represented about 2% of its total annual property revenue for 2025. American Tower’s top four customers by total revenue in 2025 were T-Mobile (18%), AT&T (17%), Verizon Wireless (14%) and Telefónica (10%).
American Tower is now guiding to new colocation and amendment revenue of about $127 million in 2026, around 20% lower than the $159 million recognized in 2025, which is consistent with prior disclosures that EchoStar was about one-fifth of leasing activity, noted Moffett Nathanson analyst Craig Moffett in a report for investors.
TD Cowen analysts said that while they see the removal of Dish revenue from American Tower’s guidance as a near-term headwind, “we expect some resolution with Dish that results in the towers receiving at least some portion of the payments owed to American.”
In Latin America, American Tower is working through accelerated churn related to Oi’s restructuring as well as continued uncertainty surrounding a dispute with AT&T Mexico.
“Given the confluence of these factors pressuring 2026 AFFO/share growth, we view 2026 as representing a (de-risked) trough growth year and would expect growth to rebound in 2027+,” the TD Cowen analysts concluded in their report.
Layoffs at Crown Castle
On Crown Castle’s Q4 earnings call earlier this month, President and CEO Christian Hillabrant announced an accelerated restructuring plan in response to Dish’s payment default. In total, Crown Castle is reducing its tower and corporate workforce by about 20%, ending with about 1,250 full-time employees on its payroll.
Crown Castle is in the process of closing the sale of its small cell and fiber businesses, leaving it to focus solely on the tower business.
During the Q&A, NSR's Barden pressed Hillabrant about the process of decommissioning Dish equipment that sits on Crown Castle’s sites. Hillabrant replied that it’s Dish’s obligation to remove the equipment, not Crown’s.
He then touched on the unprecedented nature of Dish’s behavior. Broadly speaking, “I've been in the industry a long time as well, almost 30 years,” about half of that time at an operator, Hillabrant said.
“I also can't remember a time since maybe before the consolidation of those regional carriers that ultimately became T-Mobile or part of AT&T or Verizon, where we had somebody just turn out the lights and walk away from obligations like they have. It's pretty amazing, actually, to have witnessed this in my lifetime,” he said.
A lot of unhappy vendors
Crown Castle was the second tower company, after American Tower, to file suit against Dish last year after EchoStar said they didn’t have to live up to their contract obligations due to “unprecedented and unforeseeable” action by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC).
FCC Chairman Brendan Carr, among other things, last May questioned whether EchoStar/Dish was using their spectrum licenses to their full potential and threatened to take them away.
By the end of summer, EchoStar had negotiated separate spectrum sales to AT&T and SpaceX with a combined value of more than $42 billion. The FCC still must approve those transactions.
Dozens of vendors, including American Tower, are urging the FCC to make EchoStar/Dish live up to contractual obligations as a condition of the spectrum exchanges.
Earlier this week, the president of American Tower’s U.S. tower division, Richard Rossi, met with FCC Chairman Brendan Carr’s Senior Counsel Arpan Sura to talk about the situation.
Like other tower companies and vendors represented by the Wireless Industry Association (WIA), American Tower wants the FCC to place conditions on EchoStar to “ensure funds are available to satisfy EchoStar and its affiliates’ contractual obligations to the infrastructure providers that enabled the deployment of the spectrum at issue in these proceedings,” according to an ex parte filed on Wednesday.
Stay tuned. EchoStar is scheduled to hold a conference call to discuss Q4 and 2025 financial results on Monday, March 2.