SBAC vs AKAM Comparison

SBA Communications owns a portfolio of about 45,000 wireless towers throughout North America, South America, and Africa. It leases space on its towers to wireless service providers, who install equipment to support their wireless networks. The company has a very concentrated customer base, with most revenue in each market being generated by the top few mobile carriers. It owns more than 17,000 towers in the US, which account for about 75% of leasing revenue. Internationally, SBA's largest presence is in Brazil, where it owns roughly 10,000 towers. SBA operates as a real estate investment trust.

Akamai operates a content delivery network, which entails locating servers at the edges of networks so its customers, which store content on Akamai servers, can reach their own customers faster, more securely, and with better quality. Akamai has over 325,000 servers distributed over 4,100 points of presence in more than 1,000 cities worldwide. The firm also offers security and cloud computing for its customers, and those businesses have grown to be bigger than the legacy CDN.