Telstra has switched on its first mobile base station using OneWeb’s low earth orbit satellites (LEOsats) for backhaul. The base station is located in Oxford Falls, a suburb of Sydney.
This is part of a deal between Telstra and OneWeb, signed in June 2023, to connect more than 300 remote base stations with LEOsat backhaul over the next 18 months. Telstra claims this is the largest project of its kind in the world.
Telstra has also been building OneWeb teleports since March 2022.
The LEOsat backhaul service offers guaranteed performance and quality, Telstra said. It also expects to achieve 25Gbps speeds to the remote base stations in the future.
Telstra’s network and infrastructure executive Iskra Nikolova said the LEOsat backhaul would also enhance resilience in areas where terrestrial backhaul is vulnerable to natural disasters and isolation.
She said the remote base stations would see a 15-fold increase in performance and a tenfold reduction in latency with the LEOsat backhaul.
OneWeb said its LEOsats have a round trip latency of 50 to 70ms, compared to 250ms for geostationary satellites.
