Malaysia set to roll out second 5G wholesale network

 Why LEO satellite players are telcos’ new best friends

Telcos are turning to the growing number of low-earth orbit (LEO) satellite operators to help them offer services to customers in remote and hard-to-reach areas on land, at sea and in the air.

Telcos everywhere are brokering partnerships with the likes of Elon Musk’s Starlink, OneWeb, AST Spacemobile, Lynk Global (and likely, soon, Amazon’s Kuiper)

Telstra and OneWeb new partnership partnership will result in “one of the world’s largest rollouts” of commercial backhaul connectivity using OneWeb’s LEO constellation. - will also use OneWeb connectivity for future sites where satellite backhaul serves as the preferable or the “only viable option” -will add 25 GBit/s of backhaul capacity to help it serve its most remote mobile customers.

OneWeb has more than 630 satellites in orbit today, 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.

Part of Telstra’s plans, is an extension of the testing programme for additional use cases including network backhaul resilience – such as a backup to fixed backhaul “for selected critical sites”. Other plans involve using OneWeb’s service for emerging use cases for business and government customers, such as IoT services and connectivity “on the move for the emergency services agencies, mining, oil & gas sector.

For OneWeb, the deal with Telstra symbolises “a first for us in terms of its scale & integration”, 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.

SoftBank (which owns a 19.3% share in the LEO operator), is collaborating with OneWeb on its extensive NTN plans, building on the partnership in Japan that was initially announced in 2021.

SoftBank’s interest in satellite-powered communications has long been known. In June 2021, it unveiled plans to develop NTN solutions using a multi-layered network that combines terrestrial mobile networks with LEO and GEO satellites, and high-altitude platform stations (HAPS) in the stratosphere. Shortly after, it acquired as many as 200 patents for HAPS from the now-defunct Alphabet project called Loon.

Indonesia, with the help of SpaceX, has launched the country’s largest telecom satellite, which is expected to bring internet services to remote parts of the country as part of a $540m campaign.

The project, which is a public-private tie-up between the Indonesian government and domestic satellite service provider Satelit Nusantara Tiga, is enabled by a 4.5 tonne LEO satellite that boasts a throughput capacity of 150 Gbit/s.

Satellite is key to the country – a sprawling archipelago comprising more than 17,000 islands – as it will speed up internet access to areas in Indonesia which cannot be reached by fibre in the next decade.