Telstra is embarking on a project to swap geostationary satellite backhaul in remote Australia to low-earth orbit satellite (LEO sat) services provided by OneWeb.
The project is said to be “one of the world’s largest rollouts of OneWeb backhaul for a commercial mobile network.”
Telstra said the rollout covers hundreds of remote mobile base stations currently served by geostationary satellite backhaul.
The carrier will also use OneWeb services for future sites where satellite backhaul is the preferred or “only viable option”.
Most mobile sites covered by the OneWeb agreement will get 25Gbps of backhaul, so they can serve real-time traffic such as voice and video calls.
“Part of our T25 strategy was to assess evolving satellite technologies and use them to deliver better services for customers, especially in rural and remote Australia,” Telstra group executive global networks and technology Nikos Katinakis said.
“The deal with OneWeb will help us to improve our options for our consumer, small business and enterprise customers living or working in rural and regional Australia – especially those in remote areas that require added redundancy in the instance of a power or transmission incident”.
The backhaul deployment will also help Telstra assess how to deploy OneWeb for regional voice and fixed broadband services.
Katinakis said the capability will support the T25 commitment to deliver an additional 100,000 square kilometres of mobile coverage by the end of FY25.
“We plan to extend the testing program for additional use cases including network backhaul resilience, such as a backup to fixed backhaul for selected critical sites,” he said.
“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.”
OneWeb currently has more than 630 satellites in orbit, and expects to achieve global coverage by the end of the year.
It hopes to have services offered to Australian users by midyear.
Telstra’s interest in OneWeb first emerged in March 2022, when the two companies signed a non-exclusive memorandum of understanding.
Later that month, OneWeb signed a contract with Telstra to build teleports in Darwin, Toowoomba and Perth.
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