Subcarrier’s John Paleski: A Front-Row Seat to 40 Years of Wireless Infrastructure

Before there were tower crews, safety protocols and engineered deployments, there was a teenager with a CB radio hobby and a knack for figuring things out, his name – John Paleski.

As Subcarrier Communications turns 40 years young this year and the United States turns 250, the founder and President of Subcarrier’s story is one rooted in the American dream. “I grew up a poor kid and I had to work after school, so I wasn’t really able to meet anybody,” said Paleski, founder and president of Subcarrier Communications. “I couldn’t go to any of the parties, so the only thing I could do was meet people on the CB radio.”

With no Internet tutorials to rely on, Paleski taught himself how to install antennas. That reputation eventually led to a bigger ask: remove two burned-out antennas from the top of a tower and install replacements.

The pay? $100.

“I’d never seen that kind of money before,” recalls Paleski.

He showed up after school wearing a thick cowboy belt. “I climbed the tower, and I shimmied off onto the boom mount and did exactly what he said,” recalls Paleski. “I took out my tools, undid the antennas, removed the connector and threw it all to the ground.”

There was, however, one person he didn’t tell — his mom. “If I told her what it was I was going to do, she wouldn’t have let me do it, of course,” he says.

Not in My Backyard

If climbing towers taught Paleski how to improvise, choosing a career pushed him toward something more “readily employable.” He studied economics and briefly set his sights on law school, but that path changed while clerking at a firm where he helped negotiate one of the earliest rooftop lease agreements between a building owner and NYNEX Mobile.

After leaving law school, NYNEX sought him out, and he began consulting on leasing work that would later become part of Verizon Communications. From there, leasing led to site management, site management to construction, and before long he was back in the field—only now the projects were larger, more complex, and harder to place, as communities consistently embraced wireless service while resisting the infrastructure required to support it: “You can build it,” he said, “just don’t build it here.”

“It was really next to impossible to get towers built,” he said.

At one zoning hearing, residents opposed a tower—until a pager went off, underscoring the disconnect between service demand and infrastructure opposition.

From Rooftops to Rollouts

By the mid-1980s, operating as a one-man shop no longer made sense for Paleski, so he founded Subcarrier in 1986, giving structure to the work he was already doing and building something more lasting—a team, a culture, and a shared sense of purpose.

The unpredictability of his early years, defined by climbing towers and solving problems on the fly, became part of the company’s DNA, reinforced by moments far removed from project timelines. During a severe snowstorm in Oregon, a woman drove off the road and into a snowbank, her car buried from view, but a nearby tower Subcarrier had helped build supported the Verizon network that allowed emergency responders to locate and rescue her, underscoring the real-world impact of the infrastructure the company builds.

“For us, it just reinforced that what we’re doing is a great service to the public,” he says.

As Subcarrier emerged, the broader wireless industry evolved alongside it. In 1986, Paleski became active in NABER and Telocator—organizations that linked engineering, deployment, and market demand as paging and microwave-based infrastructure scaled. That collaboration consolidated in 1995 into PCIA, now WIA, giving the industry a more unified voice.

Within PCIA, the Site Owners and Managers Association (SOMA) quickly formed to represent tower owners at the FCC, growing into a hundreds-strong forum. As large tower companies joined and paging-era priorities faded, SOMA helped steer the industry toward the infrastructure needs of a cellular future, including stronger structures capable of supporting cellular networks and regulatory reforms that resulted in the Telecommunications Act of 1996.

The scale of what had been accomplished only became clearer over time.

“In hindsight, it was quite a bit bigger than we thought at the time,” he said. “We were very happy with the outcome, of course. We had President Clinton sign this massive overhaul, and then we just moved on with business.”

Decades later, Paleski says, industry is still debating many of the same core issues – now with an eye toward what comes next, as owners begin planning for heavier loading to accommodate 6G-era demands expected to emerge later this decade.

Built for What Comes Next

Throughout his career, Paleski has remained closely connected to the organizations that helped shape the industry — from NABER and Telocator to the PCIA and its successor, the Wireless Infrastructure Association. Today, WIA continues to serve as both a meeting ground and a working forum — bringing together industry stakeholders to share knowledge, track emerging technologies and address the challenges shaping deployment.

“It’s a neutral forum for all of us tower and infrastructure professionals to meet and go over the issues of the day,” he says. “And how we can make the industry better.”

That same forward-looking mindset shapes how Subcarrier approaches its work.

“In order to move our clients forward, we have to be a step ahead,” he explained. “We have to have towers not only where they want them today, but where they’re going to need them in the future.”

That includes planning for infrastructure that will support 6G, even as standards are still evolving, by adding roughly 20 to 30 percent more loading than previous generations required.

Even as the industry has scaled, he points to challenges that are less about technology and more about execution — particularly the layered subcontracting model, or “turfing,” that can dilute accountability and strain resources as work passes through multiple vendors. Over time, he has become increasingly vocal in urging a more direct relationship between those who design infrastructure and those who build it.

That philosophy extends inward. At Subcarrier, he describes a culture shaped by continuity rather than churn. The result is a workforce defined by longevity, with many employees staying for decades — an uncommon trait in an industry often driven by project cycles and shifting demand. Even as the industry continues to evolve, he says the underlying approach remains steady.

“The future looks just as bright today as it did when we first began,” he says. “We’re going to keep doing what we do. We’re not changing the culture. We’re not changing the strategy. We’re just going to keep moving forward.”