OneWeb will provide low Earth Orbit (LEO) backhaul for Telstra commercial mobile network in Australia. OneWeb currently more than 630 satellites in orbit , with global coverage on track for the end of the year. OneWeb’s services are anticipated to begin in Australia mid-year, with worldwide service available in early 2024.
After testing in Australia, Telstra and OneWeb have agreed commercial terms and will begin moving hundreds of existing remote mobile base stations currently using satellite backhaul to OneWeb’s LEO solution from later this year.
OneWeb will provide up to 25 Gbps of LEO capacity to remote mobile sites across Australia.
Nikos Katinakis, Telstra Group Executive, Global Networks and Technology, states “It allows us to extend our options for our consumer, small business and enterprise customers in hard-to-reach places across rural and regional Australia – especially those that require added redundancy in the instance of a power or transmission incident. Our initial focus is using the service as a backhaul medium to connect remote mobile base stations. In time, it also offers us capability to deliver voice and fixed broadband services to regional Australia.”
“We plan to extend the testing program for additional use cases including network backhaul resilience, such as a back-up to fixed backhaul for selected critical sites. As well as into emerging use cases for business, enterprise and government customers like IoT and connectivity on the move for the emergency services agencies, mining, oil and gas sector,” he said.
David Thorn, Vice President, APAC at OneWeb, said “From our perspective, it’s one of the largest single rollouts of LEO satellite capacity for mobile backhaul worldwide. Telstra will also be pivotal in collaborating with us on future generations of OneWeb product development.”
