Jay A. Brown
President And Chief Executive Officer at Crown Castle
Thanks, Ben and thank you everyone for joining us on the call this morning. As you saw from our third quarter results, and the 6.5% increase to our dividend, we are seeing the benefits of a strong leasing environment, as we support our customers growth initiatives with their deployment of 5G. With this increase, we have grown dividends per share at a compound annual growth rate of 9%, since we established our long-term growth target of 7% to 8% per year in 2017, returning over $10 billion or 20% of our current market capitalization to shareholders over that period of time. Our customers have focused on utilizing towers during their initial deployment of 5G, resulting in the second consecutive year of 6% organic revenue growth in our tower business as we continue to outpace the industry.
We expect this momentum to carry into 2023 with another year of solid organic growth of at least 5% for our tower business. In addition, we expect to double the rate of small cell deployments next year, compared to the 5,000 nodes we expect to install this year to meet the growing demand for our customers, as 5G networks will require small cells at scale. For fiber solutions, we expect revenue to be flat in 2023, compared to 2022, as a result of several discrete items that Dan will discuss later. We expect revenue growth to return to approximately 3% by the end of the year. Consistent with what we have previously disclosed, we also expect the rationalization of a portion of Sprint's legacy network by T-Mobile to have some near term impacts on our financial results, without altering our long-term growth potential of our strategy.
We continue to believe the total impact of the Sprint network rationalization will be approximately $275 million of annualized churn, concluding in 2025. As I'll speak to in just a moment, I see tremendous opportunities ahead of us, giving us confidence in our ability to deliver on our long-term target of growing dividends 7% to 8% per year. However, with $225 million of remaining Sprint churn, and $140 million of additional run-rate interest expense, we expect dividend per share growth in 2024, and 2025, to be below our long-term target. Looking back over the last several decades in the wireless industry, we have experienced periods of network rationalization by our customers, following consolidation events. In each of those instances, we saw increased demand for our assets over times, as our customers reinvested the synergies gained from those combinations back into their networks to further improve their competitive positions, and keep pace with wireless data growth.
I expect we'll see a similar dynamic play out this time around. As such, over the long-term, I believe our strategy and unmatched portfolio of 40,000 towers 115,000 small cells on air under contract and 85,000 route miles of fiber concentrated in top U.S. markets have positioned Crown Castle to deliver significant value to shareholders for many years to come. We are focused on the U.S. because we believe it represents the best market in the world for wireless infrastructure ownership when considering both growth and risk. The relative strength of the U.S. market has been clear to us during times of global economic prosperity. And I believe that gap and performance is widening further in current challenging macroeconomic environment. The operating conditions underlying our shared infrastructure model have been better in the U.S. than any other market in the world.
We have benefited over time from persistent growth and mobile data that has required hundreds of billions of dollars of network investment by our customers. As a result of the quality of the networks and the user experience enabled by this level of investment, U.S. consumers have used their wireless devices more and more, and have been willing and able to pay for that improving mobile experience. In turn, the wireless carriers have taken the higher cash flows generated from their customers and invested even more in the networks and the cycle continues. When we assess the global landscape for wireless infrastructure ownership, we do not see evidence of that same virtuous cycle in any other market. The combination of persistent growth and mobile data and the value we deliver to our customers by providing a low cost shared infrastructure solution has enabled us to consistently generate growth through various macroeconomic cycles.
Further, I believe our core value proposition of reducing the overall cost of deploying and operating communications networks is even more compelling for our customers in times of increasing capital costs. Adding to our positive view of the opportunity we have in the U.S., I believe we are still in the early stages of 5G development, providing a long runway of growth and demand for our comprehensive communications infrastructure, offering across towers small cells and fiber. Similar to other generational network upgrades, we expect 5G to drive sustained growth in our tower business as our customers add equipment to our 40,000 towers.
We also believe 5G will be different as it will require the deployment of small cells at scale to increase the capacity and density of wireless networks, as more spectrum deployed across macro towers will not be sufficient to keep up with the growth in mobile data demand, as a result of the requirement to build out this denser network, we believe the duration and magnitude of 5G investment will likely exceed prior network investment cycles, further extending our long-term growth opportunity. With this view in mind, we have invested $6 billion of capital in high capacity fiber and small cells that are concentrated in top U.S. markets. That capital has a weighted average life of approximately five years, and is yielding more than 7% today. With more than 60,000 contracted small cell nodes in our backlog, including a record number of colocation nodes, we expect the yield to increase over time as we put those small cells on air.
In 2023, we expect to double our small cell deployments, with over half of the nodes co-located on existing fiber. With the increased mix and colocation, we expect our net capex to increase by only 10% over 2022 levels, reflecting attractive incremental lease up return. The resulting incremental returns are consistent with our expectation for small cell co-location to drive two tenant system returns to low-double digit yields on invested capital, just like we have achieved and towers. As we proven out the value proposition for our tower assets over time, those assets now generate a yield on invested capital of approximately 12% with meaningful capacity to support additional growth.
Looking at how well our overall strategy is performing, since 2017, we have increased our consolidated return on invested capital by 160 basis points to 9.5% and returned over $10 billion to shareholders through our dividend that has increased at a compound annual growth rate of 9%, while also investing $7 billion of capital into attractive assets we believe will generate returns well in excess of our cost of capital and contributed to dividend growth in the future. I believe that the combination highlights how compelling and differentiated our strategy is. We provide investors with the most exposure to the development of next generation that works with our comprehensive offering of towers, small cells, and fiber, a pure play U.S. wireless infrastructure provider with exposure to the best growth and the lowest risk market, a compelling total return profile with a current yield of nearly 5%, and a long-term annual dividend growth target of 7% to 8% and the development of of attractive new assets that we believe will extend our runway of growth and shareholder value creation.
In the context of our 6.5% dividend per share growth this year, it is remarkable to consider that the underlay -- to consider the underlying strength of our business can absorb the significant headwinds of interest expense increases, and Sprint cancellations in the near term without disrupting the long-term growth of the business. I believe this durability of the underlying demand trends we see in the U.S. that provides significant visibility into the anticipated future growth of our business, the deliberate decisions we have made to reduce the risks associated with our strategy and our history of steady execution makes Crown Castle an excellent investment that will generate compelling returns over time.
And with that, I'll turn the call over to Dan.