The USA leads the tower operator industry in many ways. The biggest US operators took a lead in offloading their own passive infrastructure and relying heavily on neutral hosts. Those neutral hosts – headed up by American Tower, Crown Castle and SBA – have in turn often led the way in expanding the business model. American Tower has mainly relied on geographical expansion, becoming a near-global operator organically and by acquisition. Crown Castle has experimented heavily in extending the neutral host business into street furniture, edge clouds and fiber. Meanwhile, the US operators are in the forefront of introducing advanced technologies to make their operations more efficient and profitable, such as drones to carry out tower inspections and feed digital…