SBA Communications Brand Guidelines: Boca Raton Towers From a 1989 Consultancy

A site-development business from 1989.

SBA Communications began in 1989. English Wikipedia says it was founded that year by Steven Bernstein as Steven Bernstein and Associates, the source of the initials S, B and A. The company tells its origin as a service business: on its website it says a small team started in 1989 as a site-development partner for wireless carriers, acquiring land, navigating zoning and building the structures that carried early mobile signals, and that as demand grew it became an independent owner and operator of towers.

The company’s own timeline marks the steps. SBA says it went public on Nasdaq in June 1999, then made its first expansion into markets outside the United States, passed 10,000 towers, elected status as a real estate investment trust, and was added to the S&P 500 index as its portfolio crossed 27,000 towers. It marked its 30th year in business and 20th as a public company in 2019, and its 35th and 25th in 2024. It trades under the ticker SBAC, English Wikipedia says.

Its home is Boca Raton, Florida, where the company says it is headquartered. English Wikipedia describes two business segments, site leasing and site development: SBA leases antenna space on towers it owns or operates and manages rooftop and tower sites for property owners, while its development teams handle work from site audits and zoning approvals to tower construction and the installation of antennas and radio equipment.

Towers across the Americas and Africa.

Outside the United States the company has grown largely by buying towers from operators. Its website now lists markets in Central America (Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua and Panama), South America (Brazil, Chile, Ecuador and Peru) and Africa (South Africa and Tanzania). English Wikipedia, giving figures as of 2020, says SBA then owned more than 10,000 towers in Brazil.

The largest recent deal was in Central America. On 29 October 2024 the trade publication Capacity, carrying an analysis by TowerXchange, reported that SBA had agreed to buy about 7,000 towers from Millicom, the operator behind the Tigo brand, which says it is headquartered in Luxembourg with principal executive offices in Doral, Florida, in Guatemala, Honduras, Panama, El Salvador and Nicaragua. Under the reported terms, Millicom would lease space back on the towers for 15 years, and SBA would have the right to build up to 2,500 further sites for it. In June 2025 Millicom announced a partial closing of the transaction, through the sale of its Luxembourg holding company for its Central American passive infrastructure, and said the remainder was then expected to close in the third quarter of 2025; the sources read for this guide do not give the final closing date. Capacity reported in April 2025 that SBA described the related build-to-suit agreement as its largest in more than 20 years.

At the same time SBA left smaller markets. Capacity reported in February 2025 that SBA had sold its 169 towers in the Philippines on 10 January 2025, and that TowerXchange understood the buyer to be Alliance Towers Corporation, backed by Bersama Digital Infrastructure. On 20 February 2025 SBA agreed to sell its 206 sites in Colombia to a buyer not then named, with closing expected by the end of the first quarter, the same publication reported in March; Infralogic later reported that the sale to Andean Telecom Partners closed on 15 March 2025. Chief executive Brendan Cavanagh said the exits meant “eliminating subscale markets.”

In its results for 2024, Capacity reported in April 2025, SBA counted 39,715 sites: 17,463 in the US and its territories, 18,560 elsewhere in the Americas and 3,692 in Africa.

How tower companies present themselves.

Tower companies sell something most people never notice: space on a mast. A mobile operator rents a slot on a tower, a rooftop or a small cell, and several rivals can share the same steel. That makes the business hard to picture, so the companies that run it tend to lean on a small set of images to explain what they do.

The most common is the structure itself. A steel lattice mast against a wide sky, a slim monopole beside a motorway, a cluster of antennas over a city skyline at dusk, or a lone rural tower at sunset all stand in for coverage that cannot be seen. People appear too, usually climbers in harnesses and helmets working high on a tower, a reminder that the sites are built and maintained by hand.

The second register is the map. Annual reports and investor pages often show a country or a continent dotted with sites, because the number and spread of locations is the product. Site counts, country lists and phrases such as “neutral host” or “shared infrastructure” do much of the talking.

The industry also meets in public. Trade shows such as Connect (X) in the United States and the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona put tower companies beside the operators they serve, with stands, renderings of towers and maps of networks. For a design guide, the interest lies in how a business made of steel, leases and coordinates turns that into a calm, legible identity.

Building Better Wireless.

The leadership changed from within. The company says Brendan T. Cavanagh became president and chief executive on 1 January 2024, having joined SBA in 1998 and served as chief financial officer from 2008; Capacity quoted him as chief executive on the Millicom deal in October 2024.

SBA’s brand language rests on registered slogans. Its website carries “Essential Infrastructure for Everyday Connections®” and “Building Better Wireless®,” and signs off with the hashtag #BuildingBetterWireless. The company publishes a trademark and brand-use policy that requires outside parties to get written approval before using its marks, with requests reviewed by its corporate affairs team and, where needed, its legal team, and its website points to a media-assets section for logos, brand guidelines and other materials.

On its website SBA says its business “runs on two engines”: site leasing, in which it helps mobile operators find and secure sites, and site development, which it describes as turnkey work from acquisition and zoning to construction and equipment installation. A third heading, digital, covers infrastructure the company says goes beyond towers.

The site speaks to landowners as well as carriers. It offers ground-lease buyouts to property owners and a Managed Sites programme that, the company says, turns idle rooftops and structures into income-producing properties. The company lists its values as integrity, team, performance and agility, and gives its vision as “to be our customers’ first choice provider and the industry leader in quality infrastructure solutions.”

For a design guide, SBA Communications shows how a tower company can keep the initials of a founder’s consultancy as its name and build its voice on slogans. Compare American Tower and Crown Castle, two other US tower companies. For this guide we use a night navy, a Gulf blue and a beacon orange with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep SBA Communications’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.