Australian operator Telstra said that its current 5G coverage footprint currently reaches 75% of the country’s population.
“After starting our initial 5G rollout across major cities, a big effort has been made to extend this out to our suburbs, regional centers and rural areas. You can now find Telstra 5G presence in more than 2,700 suburbs and over 200 cities and towns across Australia,” said Nikos Katinakis, group head of networks and IT at Telstra.
“In the last six months alone, we have switched on 5G services in more than 100 regional cities and towns including Port Douglass in Queensland, Yass in New South Wales and Devonport in Tasmania,” the executive said.
Telstra already has more than 1.5 million 5G devices on the network and says it is adding thousands of new 5G devices every week.
Meanwhile, Telstra’s 4G footprint is now covering more than 2 million square km and 99.4% of the Australian population, Katinakis said.
“When it comes to 5G, while we’ve been rolling it out across Australia, we’ve also been innovating and deploying new technologies to offer a better and even more reliable service to our customers. By combining Telstra 5G on low band 850 MHz spectrum and mid-band 3600 MHz 5G, you should see a boost in 5G performance when you’re indoors or on the edge of 5G coverage,” the carrier said in a statement.
Earlier this year, the Australian carrier had secured 1000 megahertz of 26 Ghz spectrum for mmWave 5G. “Adding mmWave to 5G will supercharge the network even further, adding greater capacity for more devices especially in population dense areas like big city CBDs or at major sporting events,” the executive said.
Telstra already has 50 mmWave sites live across Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Adelaide, Goulburn and the Gold Coast.
Telstra, which had launched 5G in May 2020, is currently using its spectrum in the 3.6 GHz band to provide 5G technology across Australia. Some of the cities in which Telstra offers its 5G service are Canberra, Central Coast, Brisbane, Sidney, Cairns, Gold Coast, Adelaide, Hamilton, Melbourne and Perth.
In May last year, Telstra upgraded its 5G radio access network (RAN) coverage footprint across Australia, connecting a cloud-native 5G Core (5GC) network to handle new 5G standalone traffic.
Telstra used equipment from Swedish vendor Ericsson for the network upgrade.
The 5G upgrade means that Telstra already has the capability to run 5G technology independent of existing 4G network technology.
