Telstra has begun installing fast mobile and internet services in remote areas of Australia by switching to using low-earth orbit satellites.
The upgraded service applies to backhaul – where a Telstra ground station in a remote area beams mobile traffic to a satellite which relays it to other satellites or a ground station potentially thousands of kilometres away.
The original system would beam the traffic to a satellite 36,000 km above the earth. The long distance resulted in poor bandwidth.
Telstra has now begun connecting this backhaul system to low earth orbit (LEO) satellites. Some LEO satellites fly as near as 400km above the earth, as little as one per cent the distance to a geostationary one. The result is up to 25 Gigabits per second of LEO capacity for Telstra’s most remote mobile users, the company says in a statement.
Telstra says it has begun connecting 300 existing remote mobile base station sites to the new LEO satellite system, offered by Eutelsat OneWeb. “A key feature of Eutelsat OneWeb’s service
is the provision of service level agreements (SLAs) and committed information rates which ensures a specified quality of service and performance,” says Telstra.
The telco last week trialled the service at its first converted base station at Oxford Falls, north of Sydney.
It is the culmination of a deal signed by Telstra and the UK-based OneWeb in June 2023. Telstra said it would adopt Eutelsat OneWeb’s LEO services for future sites where satellite backhaul is the preferred or only viable option.
“Eutelsat OneWeb’s LEO solution will help us improve the customer experience in regional and remote areas with lower latency, higher speeds and a more consistent experience,” said Iskra Nikolova, Telstra executive for network and Infrastructure.
“The average bandwidth for these sites will increase at least 15x, and the average latency will reduce tenfold. We’re very proud of this world-first achievement to have a LEO backhaul that guarantees that level of quality service.”
He added it was possible the new LEO satellite network would replace some existing ground-based communications.
“There’s also potential for Eutelsat OneWeb as a backup backhaul solution to improve reliability in areas where terrestrial backhaul is susceptible to natural disasters and communities find themselves in isolation.”
OneWeb’s backhaul system works differently to Elon Musk’s Starlink which uses direct customer to satellite communication for both uploading and downloading data. OneWeb’s aggregates traffic through a single ground station which sends all the data for that installation to the satellite.
