TEXT-S&P rates Crown Castle's notes 'B-'

Oct 3 - Standard & Poor's Ratings Services said today that it assigned its
'B-' issue-level and '6' recovery ratings to Crown Castle International Corp.'s
$1.65 billion proposed senior unsecured notes issue. The company intends
to use the proceeds to partially fund the recently announced acquisition of
rights to about 7,200 T-Mobile USA wireless towers. At the same time, we revised
the recovery rating on subsidiary Crown Castle Operating Co.'s credit facilities
to '3' from '4'. The '6' recovery rating reflects our expectations for
negligible (0%-10%) recovery of principal in the event of payment default and
the '3' recovery rating reflects expectations for meaningful (50%-70%) recovery.
The issue-level rating on the credit facilities remains 'B+'. All other ratings
on the company and its related entities remain unchanged.

The revision to the recovery rating on the credit facilities reflects our
assumption under our default scenario that there will be a larger pool of
unencumbered assets due to the additional of the T-Mobile towers. In our
recovery analysis, we assume that a limited number of the T-Mobile towers
remain unencumbered, with the rest used as collateral for future debt
issuances.

On Oct. 2, 2012, were revised our rating outlook on Crown Castle to stable
from positive as a result of our expectation of high leverage associated with
the T-Mobile tower transaction. We also affirmed our 'B+' corporate credit
rating and all issue-level ratings on the company. (For more information and
the complete corporate credit rating rationale, see the research update on
Crown Castle, published Oct. 2, 2012, on RatingsDirect.)

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RATINGS LIST

Crown Castle International Corp.
Corporate Credit Rating B+/Positive/--

New Ratings

Crown Castle International Corp.
Senior Unsecured
$1.65 bil. proposed nts B-
Recovery Rating 6

Issue Rating Unchanged; Recovery Rating Revised
To From
Crown Castle Operating Co.
Credit facilities B+ B+
Recovery Rating 3 4

Complete ratings information is available to subscribers of RatingsDirect on
the Global Credit Portal at www.globalcreditportal.com. All ratings affected
by this rating action can be found on Standard & Poor's public Web site at
www.standardandpoors.com. Use the Ratings search box located in the left
column.