Telstra tallies 800 5G sites, sees opportunity with Wi-Fi 6
Australian operator Telstra has started to rollout 5G technology in 26 cities across the country, the operator said in a statement.
Telstra said that its 5G network currently operates 800 sites across Australia. The company’s 5G service is already available in Canberra, Newcastle, Sydney, Brisbane, Cairns, Gold Coast, Adelaide, Melbourne and Perth, among other cities.
“We’re pleased to see our customers are excited as we are about this new technology. Since late May last year, we’ve added nearly 100,000 5G services to our network, which is huge. We’re also excited to see that customers who aren’t yet covered by the 5G footprint already readying themselves for service, with a quarter of the phones we’ve sold since July 2019 5G-compatible,” said Michael Ackland, Group Executive, Consumer & Small Business at Telstra.
The executive also confirmed that Telstra will start to offer 5G services in nine new cities over the next six months.
“Research from Telstra shows that 5G has incredible momentum, and we’re well-placed to capitalize on that. 5G adoption is set to be faster than previous generations, with 15 million handset services expected to be in operation by the end of June 2023,” Ackland said.
The executive also noted that Telstra is also focusing on the expansion of its IoT network nationwide. “We are making our IoT network even better. We’ve improved the coverage of our NB- IoT network from a single site from 100 kilometers to 120 kilometers. This means we’ll expand the coverage of this NB-IoT network from an impressive 3.5 million square kilometers to nearly 4 million square kilometers. We hope to complete that expansion in the early part of this year.”
“To use the best that the new network has to offer, we’ve launched a new Locator device connected to the Cat-M1 network. The new Locator Cat-M1 Tag reports the location of tagged items through the combined capabilities of our Bluetooth Locator Community and our world-leading cellular IoT network, improving the ability for Locator to help to track your stuff down.”
“We’ve also had discussions with vendors about the opportunities for companies to provide ways to manage, maintain, and diagnose their devices. As we connect more and more things to the internet, how can customers seamlessly diagnose and fix problems easily and seamlessly without digging out five troubleshooting manuals?,” the executive said.
The telco also announced plans to improve Wi-Fi at homes with new technologies including EasyMesh and Wi-Fi 6.
“Delivering WiFi has been a big part of the in-home experience and a big part of our vendor discussions. The big technologies this year by our vendor partners are EasyMesh and WiFi 6, the new WiFi standard which will take the home wireless network to a whole new level,” Ackland said.
“WiFi 6 will also allow more devices connected to the network with increased speed and coverage and can help optimise devices depending on if they are streaming 4K content, playing low-latency games, or simply browsing the web.”
