Telstra continues Small Cells rollouts as part of Mobile Black Spots Program

Back in February, Telstra announced that they had turned on the 300th site as part of Federal Government’s Mobile Black Spots Program. The announcement said:

With hundreds of new base stations, small cells and site upgrades built over the last 6 months or scheduled around the country during the next 6 months, this financial year (FY18) is shaping up as a big year for expanding mobile coverage for regional Australia.

Then in March, it installed 4G small cells at 50 sites across the Melbourne CBD as part of a national three-year rollout of 1000 cells intended to boost capacity. As per RCR Wireless, Telstra’s small cell program stipulates the deployment of 1,000 small cells in metro and regional locations within the next three years. Some of these areas include Sydney, Brisbane, Adelaide and Perth.

Finally, another announcement in March indicated that Telstra is trialing small cells on Tasmania’s power poles to fix mobile black spots. As per this announcement:

We have announced we will trial the installation of small cell mobile technology on TasNetworks‘ electricity distribution infrastructure to help fill some of Tasmania’s mobile black spots.

The small cells trial will begin with a single site in the Weldborough area, where a small cell installed on TasNetworks infrastructure will provide new mobile voice and broadband coverage.

With the construction of a standard mobile base station typically costing several hundreds of thousands of dollars, small cells may allow us to deliver mobile coverage and capacity to smaller communities and areas where the construction of a mobile base station would otherwise be uneconomical.

The trial will test the feasibility of using existing TasNetwork power poles to improve mobile coverage in parts of Tasmania.

Related posts:

• Small Cells to help connect Australian Outback
• Covering Australian Mobile Not-spots

Covering Australian Mobile Not-spots

Picture source

Came across this Quora question recently, "Is Australia much bigger than it appears on the map?". The answer surprised me because Australia is as big as USA or China and is 3.5 times bigger that Greenland but in the map that certainly does not show up. With a population of just 23.2 million, it's definitely bound to have loads of not-spots.

Picture Source

Telstra's 4G small cells are connect Queensland's mobile blackspots, but lack of coverage is still common. The problem with low power small cells sometimes is that the coverage area can be very small. In this particular case its less than 300 metres.

Optus is another operator committed to spend AU$1 billion to in regional and rural Australia to eradicate mobile blackspots, improve overall mobile coverage outside the big cities and help future proof the networks for data-hungry applications like video streaming.

It's the biggest network investment in the company's 25-year history and will fund:

• 500 new mobile sites across regional and remote Australia (including 114 sites built through the government's Mobile Blackspots Program)
• Upgrades for more than 1,800 sites to go from 3G to 4G
• The addition of 4G to more than 200 sites (to increase capacity for peak periods)
• The continued rollout of satellite small-cell technology (bringing voice and data to the remote outback)

I talked earlier about their 3G Small Cells using Parallel Wireless CWS here. The solution also won Small Cell Forum award in 'Excellence in Commercial Deployment of Rural/Remote Small Cells' category along with Gilat for satellite backhaul.

Here is a video showing how users reacted to one of the sites having just been turned on.


*Full Disclosure: I work for Parallel Wireless as a Senior Director, Strategic Marketing. This blog is maintained in my personal capacity and expresses my own views, not the views of my employer or anyone else. Anyone who knows me well would know this.

Rural and Remote coverage back in spotlight

The Small Cell Forum recently launched its Release 5: Rural & Remote to address the growing concern of especially rural coverage that is plaguing many developed nations.


The release contains 16 new and updated documents ranging from case studies of small cells already used in a range of rural and remote settings, through to those covering backhaul, deployment challenges, architectures and the services that can be enabled by small cells.

From my point of view, backhaul is one of the biggest challenge for the rural and remote coverage. As I have discussed in an earlier post here, satellites are a good option for rural small cells. The main issue with satellites is latency which could be around 0.5 seconds which may make them unsuitable for voice and other real time applications. Another option being trialled are Balloons and Drones as I have discussed in another post here.

The Australian operator Telstra is rolling out small cells in around 50 rural areas. While the small cells would be good for 4G data, they wouldnt be available for voice. While I do not have the details on what backhaul they are using and the voice issues could be more of VoLTE support on handsets, I am sure the users would appreciate the data coverage. If latency is not an issue then they could use OTT services like Skype, Whatsapp, Viber for voice.

The UK operator EE has been working with Parallel Wireless to use innovative mesh backhauling. Part of the licensed spectrum (20MHz chunk of EE‘s 1800MHz LTE spectrum) could be used for backhaul which would be different from the access network for the end users. The meshing allows in theory for the small cell to macro connection, with a couple of hops, be as much as 30km.

As I have mentioned in a post earlier, Vodafone UK has its own Rural Sure Signal program. Vodafone claims to have received hundreds of applications from communities across the length and breadth of the UK. Following a trial covering 12 towns and villages, it has now announced the first 30 communities selected to join the programme, which it is hoped will enhance everyday life for consumers and make it easier to do business in rural areas. There is a plan to continue this program for the rest of this year.

ThinkSmallCell has an interesting article where it asks if the drive towards the rural coverage is operator driven or regulator mandated. While it is a combination of both is most developed countries, in some developing nations it can just be that people are desperate and will find their own way. One example is people in remote villages in Mexico that are installing open source base stations from NuRAN to provide coverage to their villages. Another example is Nepal, where villagers are banding together to provide WiFi coverage to rural areas.

Opensource is another concept argues ThinkSmallCell that may also be an opportunity to connect some of the most remote and unserved communities which commercial organisations haven't been able to reach. It may also be useful for experiments and for colleges and universities with limited budgets. PA consultants have shown how to create a 2G base station using Raspberry-Pi. I have a feeling that we will see more projects like these soon.

Flying Small Cells for Rural Coverage using Drones and Balloons

Image: Google Loon Balloon

"We will begin exploring 'Air Masts'," EE CEO Olaf Swantee wrote. These are "essentially aerial small cells positioned in the sky above a hard-to-reach area, using either tethered balloons or unmanned craft, bridging the UK's transmission gap.

While this would be interesting and challenging, it wouldn't be the first time. Google has been trying something similar with its 'Loon' project. In fact its partnered with the Australian operator Telstra to bring connectivity in hard to reach places.

Kind of Flying LTE small cells, fascinating! #d2 @BellLabsOpenDay #ODays13 pic.twitter.com/NFsNveoCHK
— Andre MECHALY (@A_Mecly) June 19, 2013

Another possible approach is to have small cells via drones. A prototype can be seen above in the embedded tweet. In fact one of the articles have been nicely worded "EE Plots Drones to Blanket UK for 4G"

Daily mail has a picture of the drone as well.

Back in 2012, Daily Wireless ran an article on Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) to be used as 'Flying Cell Towers'.

The main challenge for these deployments is the backhaul. One approach is to have satellite backhaul which may be possible for balloons but may not be easy. For the drones, they would have to create a mesh network among themselves with at least one of them receiving signal from the ground.

This nice conceptual diagram from Inmarsat shows how backhaul is provided to the planes. Using a combination of satellite and complemented by a fully integrated air-to-ground network. I am assuming a similar approach for the balloons/drones.

Anyway, we will hopefully learn a lot more in the coming months and years.